This page provides online resources
to assist users in carrying out web-based research on Indonesia and East Timor. Suggestions for additional links are always
welcome!
Edited by Elizabeth Coville (ecoville@gmail.com)
What's Up on the Web:
A fortnightly update on
items of special interest to researchers on Indonesia and East Timor and
accessible through links on this page.
#3 - Searchrolls
Searchrolls are a perfect web resource to explore in the early summer. The icon
on the
Rollyo site even
looks just like a sleeping bag, as if for summer camping trips. :-) The idea of
Searchrolls is that someone prepares a 'targeted' list of websites and then the
Rollyo people make a search engine using just these sites. It's as if one
bundled up a bunch of one's productive bookmarked websites so they cab be
searched all at once instead of one by one. From one to 25 sites can go into a
single Searchroll.
To explore some Searchrolls, go to the right sidebars of John's
Simplicity
blog. Underneath the monthly calendar is a lengthy list that he calls
Searchrolls Plus (I'll talk about the Plus another time). Within this
alphabetical list are seven (as of this writing -- likely to increase) that he
has made. Conveniently, these seven include the first ones on the list -- Aceh,
I, II, and III. Click on any one of these, then on his name, and you can reach
all seven.
The websites that make up each Searchroll, such as his Indonesian Press
Searchroll, are familiar from John's earlier online projects where he would
gather urls of lots of Indonesian newspapers and the user could just click on
any they liked. But now with Rollyo, the process is more efficient and
streamlined. This is also the case for his ones on US Newspapers, US Magazines,
and Islamic News Sources. In addition, Searchrolls can be topic oriented. Hence
John's Aceh I, II, and II ones (three of them because the 25 site limitation).
Think of Searchrolls as a shortcut; by narrowing
down the options, you get more useful results from searches. Google (or any
other big search engine) throws the net so wide that, as we all know, searching
can be frustrating. On their site, the Rollyo folks emphasize 'trust,' and I
guess that is part of it. But mostly it's just that you, or someone else who
knows what they are doing, gets to decide which sites will be searched. Whenever
you are doing a search on a Searchroll, you can make the search narrower, by
clicking on a single url from the list; conversely, you can go beyond the
Searchroll altogether by clicking on 'search whole web' and you will be taken to
Yahoo's search engine.
Searchrolls are easy to make, although you do have to register, and, of course,
it takes longer to make one than use someone else's. Once made you can test them
out yourself, then let others try them out. You have the option of making them
public or keeping them private. You could combine different kinds of sources
(e.g. print, radio, television, blogs, email lists and groups, etc) in one
Searchroll. I think they could be useful in an introductory class, especially if
you were worried about letting students loose on Google with the disappointing
results that often yields.
Of course the more the Searchroll is
topic-oriented, the more challenging it is to create. One of my summer projects
is to make a Toraja searchroll. In the meantime, I am going to borrow from
John's and use some of my own favorite online news sites to attempt aSearchroll
called
News on
Indonesia (in English). In this version, I left out the Jakarta
Post, because when I tried it, with so many articles, the Jakarta Post
overwhelmed the rest of the sites. However it's worth noting that the Jakarta
Post URLs for specific articles don't disappear like that do when you search on
Google. There must be a technical way to state what I just said, but I don't
know what it is! Probably there will be further tweaking in a future What's Up
on the Web.
Posted May 25, 2006
@ 2000 Antara Kita. Southeast Asian Studies
Program, Yamada House, Ohio University, Athens, OH
45701-2979, USA.
This site was last updated on
May 25, 2006