search engine startup

can we grab a share of the SE market?

[indiandomain]

hi guys
please excuse me if you find this post a bit silly.
just had a wild thought..

how difficult is it to launch your own search engine?...not in par with google but something good enough ,that will attract advertisers

i spoke to some programmers and they claim it takes a good algo,a robust server and some spider programming to develop a pretty good SE...

let me know what do you guys think.
in these days when google and yahoo have taken over the SE market,do any of us stand a chance with a new SE startup with minimum investment..

[jmccormac]

It really depends on the scale of the search engine's target webspace. If you want to do a small country with perhaps 40,000 websites, that is easy enough and it would only take a single low power server. If you are talking of a few million websites, then the complexity increases as you are probably going to need a separate database server for websites 0-9 and each letter (a-z). You will also need good bandwidth as the crawling/indexing process would be ongoing.

Crawling is (to my mind) a very inefficient method of building a search engine's index of websites. It may be possible to use open sources like [dmoz.org...] to build a simple index to support the site while you build the index.

Getting traffic will be the hardest part. You have to advertise the search engine and you have to get users to use it. It has to have the edge over the opposition - what the business people call the Unique Selling Proposition.

The advertising only happens when you get sufficient traffic. There are a few people here on webmasterworld who run their own search engines/directories. It would probably be a good idea to post in some of the other forums here such as the Alternative Search engines one or the Directories one.

Regards...jmcc

[dmorison]

First thing:

Go for it. Nothing lasts for ever.

Second thing:

Innovation is what will give you the opportunity to compete. If you just come up with YASE (Yet Another Search Engine) then attracting traffic and advertisers will be very, very difficult - certainly whilst the big boys are still in town.

Something that recognises that the web has moved on from being an encyclopaedia to being a commercial entity would be great.

Search engines have got to move on from just "information retrieval" systems to "information and online products and services retrieval" - and as such recognise that there is huge commercial interest developing in the web that was not around when the current search engines started out.

So much commercial interest that I think it is irresponsible for the #1 position on, for example "Online Travel Planning" to be the same every time. Some fluidity in the top rankings I believe is essential.

It would also take the pressure of search engines in their endless battle against SEO - a practice that just goes to show how much is now at stake when it comes to search results.

Just my EUR 0.02.