I stayed up late last night playing with Rollyo. The idea is initially quite simple; you create personalised search engines (searchrolls), that only search certain approved sites (Wikipedia, BBC, etc.). You can categorise them, so you can have one search engine for academic searches, another for the football results, etc.

Crap idea so far, as although it might speed up search of sites you already use, you will never be able to discover something new. Well, yes. But in the beta version, there’s early signs of several good ideas. Members’ searchrolls are publishable, and can be tagged with keywords. Which means you can find out new things by exploring tags (although at the moment the site doesn’t offer this but it’s early days yet), and so you can find new things through what other people approve of or think cool, rather than relying on PageRank. If Rollyo steal throw in some features from Flickr, such as clusters (to deal with multiple and ambiguous meanings) and the ability to form groups (so members’ searchrolls can be aggregated and combined), and voila - you have a smart social search engine!

There are a number of issues to be resolved - folksonomies can be exploited and hacked by spammers every bit as much as PageRank, after all, and the whole folksonomic/social tagging idea is still very much in its early days. But still, it’s a really promising idea.