I don't think any specific MS is going to cover everything for building a search engine. You may want to look at people that work on Lucene [0], for example, a

I don't think any specific MS is going to cover everything for building a search engine. You may want to look at people that work on Lucene [0], for example, and connect to see what their background might be. My guess is there is much more algorithms (types of searches and their big-O tradeoffs, sorts, etc.) involved than dist systems/ml but I don't work on search engines. Its open source so you could just download it and tinker. You may find that a degree isn't necessary to build one. [0] https://lucene.apache.org/ https://lucene.apache.org/