Kansas based Kozoru launched a new service today called BYOMS, or build your own mobile search. It’s a handy way to search inside preselected sites by IM on a desktop or mobile device. Think Rollyo mashed up with AIM. Though not the easiest thing in the world to figure out at first, it could be a real time saver once you’ve got it set up. Kozoru is a two year old company founded by John S. Flowers, a highly controversial figure who calls himself a Silicon Valley ex-patriot. When I say controversial, I mean for example that his bio page in Wikipedia has been marked as disputed and locked from editing. Flowers also has some fans, see the video testimonial on the BYOMS site from David Warthen, co-founder of Ask.com. But Flowers is a software guy and the proof is in the pudding, isn’t it? How does it work? It took me awhile to figure it out exactly, but now that I have I see that it doesn’t have to be difficult at all. Users start an account at Byoms.com, then make a list of related web sites they would like to be able to search from IM. You can set up a search client for one site or for several together. Quite a few preferences can be changed; number of replies sought, length of the URL displayed in the results, number of sentences to display from immediately before and after the search terms, etc. The best way to see how the system works is to try it out. It’s AIM only, unfortunately, but if you’ve got an AIM account here’s three query clients you can add to your buddies list. The SearchTechCrunch buddy will search TechCrunch.com, Crunchnotes and MobileCrunch all at once. Give these a spin, you might just decide to keep them in your buddies list for good. It looks like it’s far more efficient than visiting any of these sites just to search inside them. It’s also better than using a regular search engine using the site: operative. It’s faster and there is a lot more control available, for the search builder at least. Even if there were absolutely no other strong points here, I would find it useful to be able to search inside multiple sites with one fast query. There are two key steps you’ll want to remember when creating your own byoms. First, you → Read More
