Rollyo - Nice UI But Nothing New

I’ve spent a couple of minutes (yep, very in-depth :)) playing with Rollyo, a way to run searches over multiple sites. The site’s pretty slick (and looks quite Basecamp/37signals inspired) but I can’t help but think I’ve been here before…

Mozilla, and FireFox with a plugin, have something called the search sidebar. This little piece of magic allows you to run a search over multiple sites at the same time and integrates the results; each site search is implemented using a mycroft search plugin. Except that those are text files and easier to customise if you know a little about HTML.

One thing that did bother me though was the lack of meaningful page titles. Look at the front page and the title says “ROLLYO”. Look at a profile and the title says “ROLLYO”. Spot a pattern?

Now don’t get me wrong, Rollyo looks a lot prettier and makes this functionality available to a lot more people but it’s not quite the power-tool the Mozilla version can be.