There seems to be quite a lot of fuss in certain web circles at the moment about Google’s custom search [1] which allows you to make a search engine which searches only certain websites…a perfect idea for theme based searches.
It’s actually rather amusing that Rollyo [2] has been doing the same thing with Yahoo powering it for quite some time. Rollyo seems to have built up a community of sorts, and is aimed more at personal users than website owners, although it certainly is useful for website owners. Google’s offering has less personal features (such as the ability to create a Firefox search bar search engine), but does have the advantage of offering website owners a cut of the ad revenue through their Adsense program…Rollyo has a similar “partners program”, but isn’t as easy to setup as Google’s offering.
Rollyo is limited to 25 websites per search engine, which probably doesn’t matter for most topics, but is certainly an annoying limitation for others.
Overall I think Rollyo is the more polished product at this stage, with Google’s offering feeling like a mere extension of their “search one site” service. There is more than enough room for both at the moment, but if and when Google decide to come up with the features Rollyo already has…then Rollyo will probably be squeezed out. Actually, that could be the first time in a while that Google have squeezed someone out rather than buying them.
Samuel