One of my consulting clients, a news search engine called Rootly, relaunched this afternoon and I’m so proud of them!

Rootly founder Mark Daher and I worked together to improve the aesthetics, functionality and differentiation of the service. It’s been some time since I sent him my final recommendations and today the site looks totally unlike it did at the time.

The service provides highly customizable, RSS powered vertical news search based on about 1k preselected sources, plus any sources you add by feed. When a source is added by a sufficient number of users it gains trusted status and enters the general index. The search result feeds are good, there’s really easy internal bookmarking, commenting and friends. The best part of it: Rootly accepts OpenID! I can’t take any credit for that, but thank goodness! Who wants to create a new account for every service you want to try out? Not me. (I use MyOpenID, personally. It’s great and local to Portland.)

In the near term future the site will allow OPML import – which has a whole lot of implications – and a customizable widget for personal startpages.

For more information about the relaunch, see the review at CenterNetworks and more details on the Rootly blog.