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Learning Schmearning: Thing 28: Rollyo vs. Google Custom Search

Monday, April 28, 2008

Thing 28: Rollyo vs. Google Custom Search

Well, first of all, there is something seriously wrong with that "Rare Book Library Search" given as an example. It doesn't seem to have heard of Faulkner or Stonewall Jackson, and only managed two hits for Shakespeare. What's up with that? I made my own search,


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which you can also see in the upper left hand corner of this blog. I might want to leave Amazon out....

I don't know, I haven't spent a whole lot of time exploring Rollyo--there are no doubt better searches to be found. And the ability to add a little widget is nice. I haven't noticed whether you can do that with Google Custom Search or not. There is a danger in limiting searches to a select number of sites: you may be excluding something that could be very helpful.

My Google version is at Rare Book Finder.

If I search "stonewall jackson's daughter" (I didn't actually use quotes, though I suspect that doesn't matter anyway) with Rollyo, I get 160 hits. If I do so with Google, I get only ten--but they are smart hits, closely related to my search, whereas the Rollyo search was all over the place. This, despite the fact that I used the same search engines in both. Wonder why?

One guy who is doing a similar 2.0 training elsewhere commented that a library could use Google Custom Search and avoid the ads that come with Rollyo.

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