http://rsfgalleries.com/search This is just a site idea I got a while back that I have been developing. I don't have a name or domain yet (probably going to have to start a contest here), but the backend is basically all done. In a nutshell it's a user-generated batch search engine. I just want to know if it's easy to understand the purpose and syntax, and if this is something that you might use. Also, I know this is something I should have thought of ages ago, but what would be the best way to eventually monetize this? I would normally use adsense or something similar, but I've noticed that the adsense is not very targeted because there are very few keywords that google can use just because of the nature of the site.
I love it, actually. I wouldn't use it on a day to day basis like I would Google, but I love the concept, the design, etc. I understood it, but I would recommend updating the look of the Learn More page to fit the look of the front page. What you could do is put Adbrite on the search pages similar to a proxy to maximize income, as well as some sort of CPC or CPM program on the front page.
Hmm. This seems like a slight twist on meta search engines. Basically the idea is to submit the user's query to multiple search engines, and then reformat the results in a useful way. I think your approach has some serious limitations, not least of which that it doesn't scale well. A search for "movie review: capote" turned up useful results, but "review: furnace" returned an error that there were no results of type "review". A rep from Google recently mentioned that 20% of the queries that they receive each day they've never seen before. That means that you will <i>never</i> be able to provide meaningful results to a sizeable subset of your user base. I'm also not sure that tabbed results are a useful way to reformat the results. The benefit of meta search engines is that you can easily see what results they have in common, and where they differ. Not the case with yours. On the monetization side, many of the meta search engines sell stats on their queries to companies like Wordtracker. Innovating in the horizontal keyword search space is really really hard.