Rollyo Ho Me Hearties! Finding Buried Treasure with Custom Search Engines

I searched for rss in the KCLS & Neighbors Rollyo and Google Co-op custom search engines and the results could not have been more different. Try it yourself by selecting "KCLS & Neighbors" and typing "rss" in My Rollyo search box on my blog.

In Rollyo, Tacoma Public Library's RSS feed service dominated the search results while KCLS was absent from the results list.

In Google Custom Search Engine, the same search produced hits for KCLS, but none for Tacoma Public Library's RSS feed service.

Then I searched "interlibrary loan" and was happy to see the KCLS Interlibrary Loan Request Form at the top of the results list in Google Custom Search. However, SPL topped the result list in Rollyo. KCLS was the fourth result down.

If there were time, it would be interesting to study how the "search robots" work in both of these services. How do they harvest or tag website content for retrieval? What criteria do they use for sorting results?

What I like about this kind of service, at least in theory, is the ability to quickly extract pertinent data from websites that contain a lot of information, some of it buried, like treasure. That brings me to my own experiment with creating custom search engines.

I'm not certain that my Rollyo custom search engine for "Stargate Atlantis TV" is more helpful than doing a regular Google search but I found creating a search roll to be a remarkably satisfying kcls27things exercise.