12. rollyo own

Roll your own search tool with Rollyo.

A few years ago, before Rollyo went away, I'd created a couple of search tools, and had plans to make a few more. In my current branch we get a lot of questions about old movie stars and film history, so I assembled a Cinema Search comprised of sites like IMDB and the Academy Awards. I found that putting it together was somewhat cumbersome, and didn't offer any particular benefits over just using Google. I can see where a specialized researcher might want to build her own search tool, but for general librarianship it was too time-consuming. Perhaps that's why Rollyo isn't around any more; there are already adequate search engines out there to meet most people's needs.