I rolled one. It didn’t work. It was intended to be an image searching roll, and at first it had four sites defined: flickr, altavista images, google images, and yahoo images.

The first time I tried it, it pulled results only from Flickr. I deleted Flickr from the URL list and tried again. Then it pulled results only from Altavista, but they weren’t photos. The text alongside the box for URL entry said that you should use only top level domains, which would be why the Altavista part didn’t pull photos (the URL was www.altavista.com/image/default rather than images.altavista.com ). So I deleted that URL and tried again (supposedly searching Yahoo Images and Google Images), and it told me there were no results.

The search term in each case was “Watchmen.” I am certain that both Google Images and Yahoo Images have results for that term, and indeed a quick trip to the sites confirms that they do (and quite a lot of them, for obvious reasons).

So then I decided the site was broken, and decided also that I should move on.

My roll (restored to three URLs, pulling results only from one, and therefore still broken) is here.

The site is a great idea, and it could be useful in a library setting–very useful, in fact–if only it worked.