I think for most people writing a search engine is overkill when there are existing options out there. If you want to search a subset of sites, then Google CSE

I think for most people writing a search engine is overkill when there are existing options out there. If you want to search a subset of sites, then Google CSE is really all you need + whatever bells & whistles you'd like to add around it. I've done that here: http://searchESLCafe.com http://searchESLCafe.com, adding "recent searches", search via wildcard subdomain (i.e. foo.searchESLCafe.com or bar.searchESLCafe.com or foo_bar.searchESLCafe.com, etc), and customizing the heck out of Google CSE's options. Is there a demand out there for the search engine to parse the results into something informative at-a-glance? I'm not so sure it's the user's first priority. Or, to put it another way, there's plenty of hard-to-reach info out there that you can hand users via a customized Google CSE, and they don't mind doing the leg-work of clicking on the query results and finding their own answers. It's a lot more important to have an accurate search algorithm than drill-down-related bells & whistles. Google does a great job of returning solid results for any subset of sites, so why not let Google handle it, and concentrate on the other stuff?