(Disclaimer: I've been doing some consulting/advising for this company.) There's an interesting search company out there called Optevi that's working on bringing customized search to a new level. The site works through the use of "bundles" that are basically a collection of pre-selected sites for the search results to be drawn from. Now many of you are out there saying "yeah? so, sounds like Rolly-o." It's true that it sounds like Rolly-o, but Optevi is looking to take things a step further. Whereas Rolly-o allows users to create a long list of sites to search, Optevi breaks those lists down into four categories with different weight being put on each one.

When users create bundles on Optevi, they're putting web sites into categories like "love it," "like it," "dislike it," and "blacklist." Sites on the blacklist will never show up in search results while sites in the other three categories will be weighted appropriately based on which category they've been assigned to. Users that don't feel like taking the time to create their own bundles can use bundles that have already been created by other users.

Basically, what Optevi is looking to work off is "trust" rather than "pure algorithm." Optevi founder Dan Abrams hopes that Optevi's model will help users not only find the data they are looking for more quickly, but will also eliminate the issue of spam. After all, a spam site would only be included in your search results if it had been manually added to a bundle.

The obvious downside of a service like Optevi is that you run the risk of missing new sources that you've not yet discovered elsewhere. That might not be a big issue if you regularly run traditional searches and update your bundles to include any valuable new sites. The same goes for Optevi's default bundles...they'll have to work to keep them up to date with the latest quality sites.

If you haven't yet taken a look, it's worth a few moments to check out. You'll need to register to create your own bundle, but you can take the default bundles for a spin as soon as you get there.