Ballad in Plain E

Well, Steve beat me to blogging about the new Google Co-Op Custom Search Engine, but I couldn’t let that stop me. Needless to say, I am pretty stoked. I’m not sure if anything will compare to the day that I discovered Rollyo, but this was pretty exciting.

Rollyo had been out for about five months when I heard about it - five months too many, if you ask me! The first time I visited the site, I quickly rolled my own vertical search comprised of the websites of big BC law firms and some of the major ones from across the country. (When I say quickly, I really mean it. All you do is paste in a bunch of URLs and you’re more or less good to go.)

This particular “roll” is invaluable for searching only these sources for a couple reasons, the biggest ones being:

• Simplifies searching for an “expert” in a particular practice
• Cuts through irrelevant sources to find very current (and usually authoritative) commentary on new legislation, caselaw, etc., especially when only results from our jurisdiction(s) are desired
• (I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but…) finding out what topics other law firms/lawyers are writing about is a breeze

I use Rollyo probably once a week to do one of those searches. Eager to see how it stands up to Rollyo, I created an identical engine in Google Co-Op CSE and ran a few test searches. The results? Not surprisingly, they were comparable.

When I ran a search for “Apology Act”, Google beat Rollyo by one hit. On a search for “tax on legal services”, Rollyo beat Google by one hit. Tests of more complex searches yielded different results, though neither set was clearly better or worse than the other. Since Rollyo is powered by Yahoo and Feedster, and Google Co-Op CSE is powered by, well, Google, it’s only natural that that results will differ.

Just as it’s a good habit to use more than one search engine, I think applying the same logic to a vertical searches powered by different engines is probably a good idea, too.

By the way, if you’re not scanning headlines at the Official Google Blog, I recommend checking it out. There’s a certain amount of fluff on there, but there’s a lot of good stuff too. The posts are made by the people who work there, so even if it is a little Kool Aid-y, it’s cool to read the description of a project written by someone who actually worked on it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 10:10 pm and is filed under el internet, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.