How difficult is it to build a search engine?

Does anyone know the kind of investment?

[rominosj]

How is a search engine built? What kind of investment is needed monetary and intellectually speaking?

Any ideas?

[Bobby_Davro]

If you have to ask...

What it comes down to is: how long is a piece of string?

Are you talking about a regional search engine, a specilalised one, an English language engine or a global engine?

Do you in fact want a directory, rather than a crawler?

Would you accept results from Yahoo or Google instead of building your own?

How much can you afford?