Pop Culture Junkie-Custom Search engine.

I have been playing around with Rollyo to create my own customized search engine. I decided on Pop Culture Junkie. Using some sites that I use everyday, like Wikipedia, Internet Movie Database, and New York Times and some that I don't use that often, like Internet Broadway Database, Metacritic, and others, I created a search engine that I could use to search for information and trivia on Pop Culture. Through out my day I think of a movie, television show, book or something that I think, "mmmm when was the first episode of Bewitched" or "How did Tennessee Williams die?". I often find myself bouncing back and forth between Wikipedia or Internet Movie Database. So I did find Rollyo helpful in creating a search engine that would search all my favorites at the same time. I was not however overly impressed with the results. For one thing.. the advertisements and the sponsored sites, I know, I know they have to pay their bills, nothing is for free, but the format and the layout left something to be desired. The other thing is the hits themselves. Depending on the search, sometimes the first two pages were all from one site, say Wikipedia. I would rather have a page with hits from all the sites. I did discover some interesting things while working with Rollyo. While deciding what sites to use, I found that New York Times has a Topics Index that is very useful. I also found Internet Public Library site to be very helpful in identiying sites with pop culture information.

So near the end of this assignment I thought, I wonder if there are other Custom Search engine generators, so I search Google and found that Google themselves has a Custom Search Engine service. And since I have a Google account for Igoogle, I designed a Pop Culture Search Engine at Google using the same sites and compared. Google has no ads, well at least one version for non-profit orgs and schools. You can post your custom search to your Google home page, YES, now I can search only pop culture everyday from my home page!! And you can put a widget on your blog! I could not find the same at Rollyo, it may be there, but could not find it. So all and all I liked my Rollyo and Google Custom search engine experience. I will use my Google Pop Culture everyday, since it is handy on my home page. And I will keep playing with Rollyo and Google.

First Bewitched: September 17, 1964 Tennessee Williams died at the age of 71 after he choked on a eye drop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York City. (Found both bits of info pretty quick with Pop Culture Junkie)