The age of personalisation is coming. No longer, Google will serve the individual needs. When it comes, collecting worthy weblinks, bookmarks, every one is an expert - I personally have a list of bookmarks that I trust for collecting information (I follow their RSS and read them daily). So, why not build a personal search engine around those trusted websites?






There are few tools that allow you to build such "personal search engines". The pioneer is of course, Rollyo. Rollyo is built on the Yahoo web search and using it you can build a custom search engine or the expert search engine.

Rollyo came topped the search engines category at the SEOmoz's Web 2.0 awards 2007. With Rollyo, you can create your own custom search engine. You can select up to 25 weblinks and submit them to tell Rollyo to return results from them.

For example, I have created a "Blogging Tips" search engine that will allow you to find tips and tricks from professional bloggers who are very authoritative in their voice. The topic covers how to manage your blog, how to make money with it, how to market and build traffic for your blog.









You can directly export your IE / Firefox or del.icio.us bookmarks to a .csv file and then you can use it to create your Rollyo search engine.






You can add Rollyo to your Firefox Toolbar



You can also use Rollyo RollBar Bookmarklet to search from any browser.

You can share your Rollyo search engine

• by providing a direct web link http://rollyo.com/thiru/blogging_tips/


• or embedding a search box on your web page

How do you make money with Rollyo?


To make money with Rollyo, you need to apply first to teamrollyo [at] gmail [dot] com. Their FAQ says,

"If you have a well-trafficked site or blog that features advertising or
affiliate deals, you could be a perfect fit for the Rollyo Partner Program."

Google Custom Search : Google Co-op
That's why Google also followed the Rollyo model and built the Google Custom Search Engine or simply Google Co-op.





The concept and setting up procedure is similar to Rollyo. But, there is no limit to the number of weblinks (Rollyo has 25).



Google Co-op is potentially far more superior that Rollyo as it gives "labels" feature to classify and categorise your weblinks - something similar to "tags". With search refinements, you can build a powerful search engine that will provide results suiting to the audience (kids, adults, professionals or dummies), subject type (scientific, entertainment, information), document type (word, excel or pdf) and where does it come from (blog, portal, private or government based web pages).


People can contribute to your search engine (you have the control). Using Google Marker, you can improve your search engine as you browse, search the web.

With Adsense, you can make money:Oh yes, when it comes to monetization, it is simple and easy. All you need to do is integrate your Adsense account with it.

"To make money from your Custom Search Engine you can join Google's AdSense for Search program, which places contextually relevant ads on your Custom Search Engine's search results pages - and pays you a share of all the revenue that's generated from those ads. For more information about how the AdSense for Search program and Custom Search Engine work together, visit the Make Money page in your search engine's Control Panel." - Google Co-op FAQs

Invariably, you need to popularise your search engine, to tell the world. Learn few tips from the experts on how to do it.


Despite of such tools, the personal search engine is still to hit the mainstream. Why not you pioneer the field and make some bucks. Start today. All you need is a list of your web links or bookmarks specific to a category (such as Aussie Blogs).

Now, you have two search tools with which you can build personal search engines and benefit from them too.