Rollyo Woe

Well, I experimented with Rollyo, and now my computer is inert silicon and plastic. I tried a search configuration I called "Reviews" in order to search for book reviews on selected sites: NY Times, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and NY Review of Books. I ran a search for "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner. I got hundreds of hits, 98 percent of which were on the NY Times site. I think that every page with their bestseller list on it (every page in Book Review, maybe) showed up separately all the way back through the archives. There were hundreds of useless "hits" in the search results. I did better searching those other publications one at a time. The biggest problem was that Rollyo doesn't seem to let you choose which page of results to view next--I think you just have to page through one at a time until you get to page 745 with the result you're looking for. I'll have to check that again.

The biggest problem was that IE7 kept crashing as I tried to create another custom search tool for "News".

Also, I find that I rarely if ever want to search only so many sites. Normally, either I know exactly where I want to go as the best place for certain info (e.g., I always rely on NY Times book and film reviews because the reviewers best match my taste and opinions) or else I'm casting a wide net looking for something I haven't been able to find (e.g., a recipe for making Double Gloucester cheese that isn't on any of the sites I normally get recipes from). So, it's not that useful to me so far, though I'm going to try and rethink how I do things.

It also occurs to me that if I limit my search to a selected group of websites, then I'm going to miss new sources of info. Also, as Google continually improves its search engine (numerous tweaks a week, according to Google sources), I get what I'm looking for in Google by using good searching techninque, carefully selecting words and relying on quotation marks.