Everybody's doing it: rolling their own searches. Rollyo lets you create and share domain-specific searches. In the space of a few minutes, you can register, select a bunch of websites to limit a search to, and then link to the resulting "personal search engine."
For instance, if you wanted cut through a lot of the noise which normally turns up in a search for our hero, you can type in a few keywords in the search box for "Henry Reed."
Rollyo is running a plain, vanilla Yahoo! Search in the background, which makes it slightly less accurate than using, say, a9.com, which runs on Google. Because the search pages are user-created, however, most of the gruntwork and vetting is already done. Human-editing is what made Yahoo! such a great tool to begin with.
And, for the benefit of gawking and abuse, there's a "My Rollyo" feature which allows you to save your favorite searchrolls, and propel the elite to "High roller" status.