Go ahead, compete with Google Search: Why its is not that crazy to go build a search engine. by Alexis Smirnov.
Alexis doesn’t sound very promising at the start:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google Search has become a shining example of progress towards accomplishing this mission.
Google Search is the best general-purpose search engine and it gets better all the time. Over the years it killed off most of it’s competitors.
But after a very interesting and useful review of non-general public search engines, he concludes:
To sum up, the best way to compete against Google is not to build another general-purpose search engine. It is to build another vertical semantic search engine. The better engines understand the specific domain, the better chance they have to be better than Google.
See the post for the details and get thee to the software forge to build a specialized search engine!
PS: We all realize the artwork that accompanies the post isn’t an accurate depiction of Google. Too good looking. 😉
PPS: I am particularly aware of the need for date/version ordered searching for software issues. Just today I was searching for a error that turned out to be a bad symbolic link but the results from one search engine included material from 2 or 3 years ago. Not all that helpful when you are running the latest release.