Google announced their latest initative a few days ago – Custom Search Engine. With this you can specify the sites that you want to include in your search. You can customize the look and feel and place it on your website. Users can search using this custom search engine and when they click relevant ads, you make a piece of the revenue.

Dave Pell’s Rollyo has had the core feature of the custom search engine called SearchRolls for a long time – probably for more than a year now.

But the buzz generated by Google CSE was huge as compared to the buzz that Rollyo generated.

Why? I think there are two reasons:
1. Brand power – obviously everyone is watching whatever Google announces
2. Incentive power – Google lets you make money however small it is – it is still an incentive.

There may be more reasons but that’s what I can think of now.