Among the interesting offerings on the customizable Web are services that allow you to create your own search engine. These services allow you to create a search engine focused on your topic of interest. They are a welcome answer to the one-size-fits-all engines that dominate the Web.

I've been looking at Rollyo and the beta tool Eurekster Swicki. These services have different emphases.

Rollyo allows you to select the sites you want to search, and creates a search engine, called a searchroll, for just those sites. You can configure your search engine to cover one site, a collection of sites, or the entire Web. You can also create searchrolls from your bookmarks. You can add the RollBar Barbookmarklet your browser's links bar to access your searchrolls. You can create custom search engines for your Firefox search bar. And you can add a custom search box for your searchroll on your Web site. Nicely done.

Swicki is more of a generalist tool that searches the Yahoo! index and blogs, and returns results based on the collection of keywords that you define. You can emphasize sites that you wish to search to give them preference, and you can exclude sites from the search. The development of your swicki only begins when you create it. The community aspect comes in with the behavior of its searchers. Using click data to gauge user interest, the relevance of the results is constantly updated. Each swicki has a buzz cloud, e.g., a tag cloud, that can be configured and also changes based on user seach behavior. As swicki owner, you can manipulate search results to increase a hit's relevance, delete a hit from the results, tag a hit, etc. Soon it will be possible to share administrative rights with others.

I've opted to experiment with Swicki by creating one called "Library 2.0 in Higher Education." At first, I placed the results in the sidebar on this blog, but it didn't load quickly enough, or consistently. Swicki is in beta, after all. So, search this swicki on the Swicki site and tell me what you think. [Addendum: I'm continuing to experiment with featuring this tool in my sidebar.]

These types of services are promising for academic libraries. Bibliographers, instruction librarians and reference librarians can all come up with useful ways to employ them. In addition, students can use these tools as research aids in their courses (when their instructors allow them to use the Web as a source - an ongoing issue).

User-created search tools tap into the customizable, indivualistic, flexible, community-based Web. They are another example of third-party services that we need to be exploring to enhance our services to users.