Rollyo

» see rollyo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Rollyo's premise was that the problem with search was too much web rather than too little. Pick the twenty five sites you actually trust and put a fence around them. Everything outside never appears, so the ranking problem gets easier and the spam problem disappears entirely. In 2005 this was a serious idea held by serious people.

Dave Pell put it into a private beta in august 2005 and launched it publicly on 28 september. The name came from "roll your own" and the things you made were called searchrolls. Angus Durocher built it and Dan Cederholm designed it, which in that year was a signal of its own about what kind of product this was going to be. The index underneath came from Yahoo, so Rollyo never had to crawl anything. It only had to decide what to hide.

The good version of this was a person with real expertise publishing their list. A cooking searchroll made by somebody who had spent a decade reading recipe sites was worth more than a general query, because the filtering had already been done by a human who cared. You could clone somebody else's roll and edit it, or embed the search box in your own page. Firefox would take one as a search plugin. By august 2006 there were roughly 150,000 of them.

In 2005 I was twenty one and at university, on TTNet at home, and the search box I used had one field and nothing to configure. Rollyo wanted the work up front: know which twenty five sites deserve your trust, then keep that opinion current as they change. I did not have twenty five Turkish sites worth fencing off, and for anything in English I was going to type the same address as everybody else.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twenty five sites ~

The number is the interesting part. Twenty five is small enough to curate by hand and far too small to answer an arbitrary question, which means every searchroll was a bet that you already knew roughly where the answer lived. That works for a beat you follow professionally and falls apart for everything else, which is most of what anyone searches for.

The other cost was maintenance. A list of trusted sites is accurate on the day you make it and slowly wrong afterward, as blogs stop updating and domains get sold. Nothing in the product told you your fence had rotted. The searchroll kept returning results, they were just quietly worse every year.

~ the bookmarklet years ~

The august 2006 update is the one worth remembering, because it shows a small team trying every shape the idea had. There was a redesign and a cloning feature that let you fork anyone else's engine. There was also a Rollbar bookmarklet that would search whatever site you happened to be looking at. That last one solved a genuine problem: site search in 2006 was usually terrible, and putting Yahoo's index behind it was an obvious improvement.

This is the pattern for a lot of the web 2.0 middle layer. The company sits between a large index and a user who wants something slightly different, and it survives exactly as long as the large index refuses to offer that difference itself.

~ what google did to the idea ~

Google Custom Search Engine arrived in late 2006 and did the same job for free, from inside the index everybody was already using. That took the business away. What took the idea away was slower and harder to argue with: general search kept improving, and the personal fence stopped paying for the effort of building one.

By 2012 the site was gone. No date is recorded anywhere reliable, only that it had stopped answering by september of that year. For a product whose entire pitch was human curation, going out with nobody bothering to write down when is a fitting enough finish.

~ the man who kept curating ~

Dave Pell did not abandon the argument, he just took the machine out of it. In 2011 he started NextDraft, a daily email in which one person reads an unreasonable amount of news and sends you ten links with a line of commentary on each. It is the same conviction that made Rollyo, executed without any software worth the name.

That turned out to be the version that lasted. The filter people wanted was never a configurable search box. It was somebody else's judgment, delivered on a schedule, with a name attached to it.

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