Life is grand

Google Co-op allows you to create your own search engine. You specify a list of sites and are given a home-page which lets you use Google to search just that list or the whole web but with an emphasis on those sites.

This is really useful for specialists or groups of people who have a set of quality sources on a given topic. e.g. Ruby on Rails developers or horticulturalist. Google Co-op lets just one person or a group of invited people to contribute to the list.

I think it is even more useful as a personal search engine. Here I have created a search list that searches just my resources on the web. It includes my Flickr photos, my del.icio.us and Blinklist links and my blog. Other people can use it but it is more useful to me as a way to pull out past things I have written about, photographed or linked to.

Rollyo does much this but I found their interface a bit complicated and it wasn’t using the great Google search engine.

A friend has a really good idea. Allow users to do a full-text search across the sites they have bookmarked. Wether that be your Firefox/IE bookmarks or your del.icio.us/Blinklist links. With systems such as Rollyo this would not be hard to do.

Rollyo is a good idea but I never use it as the link between the sites I visit and value and the sites in my custom Rollyo search engine is not automatically updated. If Rollyo would monitor my Blinklist links adding sites as I blink them I’d have good reason to use Rollyo. Integration into Firefox(through the search textbox top right) or Blinklist would be ideal.

(Rollyo does have a “bookmark importer” tool but it isn’t automatic and only works with your Firefox bookmarks, not del.icio.us and co.)