Over the past few weeks, we at the Yahoo! Developer Network have been working with our Yahoo! Search colleagues to launch a couple of enhancements to our search-related developer offerings: version 2.0 of our Search SDK and new functionality for our Site Explorer API.

While we love pushing out new capabilities to developers using the Yahoo! Search platform, we love the applications they build even more. We especially like it when developers continue to build new functionality on top of our core APIs. Rollyo, the “roll your own” search engine and one of our earliest partners and users of the Yahoo! Web Search API, recently rolled out (pun intended!) a new version of their product with a batch of new features, including a new homepage and a dashboard that allows you to manage your Rollyo experience. As the Rollyo FAQ says, “Yahoo provides the engine and Rollyo puts you behind the steering wheel” — and the new model of the powered-by-Yahoo! Rollyo car handles quite nicely, thank you very much.

If you’re not familiar with Rollyo, the core of Rollyo is the “Searchroll,” a personalized search engine that provides results from a collection of user-selected sites about any topic of interest. The topics of the Searchrolls range from “Everything Star Wars” to “Modern Furniture” to “Celebrity Gossip” — and everything in between. Users can also share any of the over 100,000 existing Searchrolls with each other. Even better, any user can make a copy of any Searchroll they like and tweak it to make it their own, and then share the new Searchroll with others. You can also use the new Rollbar bookmarklet to search any site you’re visiting and to access or edit Searchrolls from anywhere. And you can add any of your Searchrolls to your Firefox search toolbar.

Congrats to Dave Pell and the Rollyo team on their relaunch. We’re looking forward to helping accelerate the efforts of more developers like Rollyo with web-scale search (and other) services from the Yahoo! Developer Network. If you?re looking for inspiration and the tools for your next big idea, be sure to keep up with what we?re doing at our blog.

Chad Dickerson
Yahoo! Developer Network