Forum Moderators: phranque
Depends what you mean by a "search engine". A spidering engine that ranks billions of urls according to some alogrithm and is competitive to a respecatble degree? Very challenging -- even at a hardware level alone, to say nothing of a programming level -- and a dollars invested level as well.
A "meta search" that blends the results of various crawling engines? Perhaps not quite so challenging, but still not a one afternoon project, and probably not a one man budget either.
If you just want to do this for the experience, and being competitive isn't part of the picture, it's getting easier and easier to do. There are open source spidering tools and if you just want half a million urls to play with or so, then you've got a "relatively" easy project.
And, there would be a way so people can add there own links, right?
That's not to say there's no room for improvement or no chance for an upstart. If you're serious about competing big-time your best talents should be recognizing talent in others and motivating them--not to mention writing a decent business plan and knowing a few VC's.
Buy a winning Power Ball ticket for seed money. :)
But, where would i find the link list?