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I was toying around with my Mac this afternoon when I wasn’t distracted by my cats. My goal was to create a Rollyo search engine that combined all the latest press releases from many of the more popular free press release Websites such as Free-press-release.com. Why not create a website where educators can pull down the hottest information?

As I was doing a little research, I stumbled across press release sites from Microsoft, Apple, and Google. So my quest began, how could I get these three technology giants’ press releases into my “little search engine that could?”

There was a slight problem with Rollyo preventing me from doing so. It’s all or nothing with Rollyo. If you add a site address like “http://www.google.com/press/” you get the search results from “http://www.google.com.” That’s a big difference. The same thing happened when I used the Apple press release address. I got results for all of Apple.com.

So this is where serendipity tapped me on the shoulder. I figured what if I entered Apple’s press release address into a short url? I figured why not give it a try. What could it hurt? I figured the results “http://bit.ly/MPljp” might just hide the entire Apple address from Rollyo and direct it to http://www.apple.com/pr/ and not all of Apple. No luck.

But something curious did happen. With a quick Web search for “kindle”, unique addresses from bit.ly started showing up like http://bit.ly/info/4HzUmv. Apparently bit.ly allows the creator of a short link to track their links. The result not only show the article linked, the title, but also how popular the link is and where it’s linked to. Amazing. I’ve just discovered a backdoor into someone else’s link tracker.

So my next thoughts turn to who actually uses short link websites? Well, probably someone who will be sharing that link a lot such as bloggers, writers, columnists, etc–people who are into technology and educating people. Or just lazy guys like me that don’t want to keep typing the same old long address in over and over again. Not a bad group to be associated with.

I finally gave up on my quest to direct Rollyo into peaking into specific directories. But as a consolation, I replaced Apple.com, Microsoft.com, and Google.com press release sites in my Rollyo Search Engine with a few URL shortening Websites such as http://bit.ly and http://www.shorturl.com.

I’m pretty happy with the results.

Xtra

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