Sphider has a new BETA out with much improved searching (stemming of words, etc). They seem to be really working hard on it. I am testing out the beta -> http://www.deepmarket.com/sphider/search.php You can download the beta here -> http://www.cs.ioc.ee/~ando/sphider/forum/board_entry.php?id=2429
I started building my search engine in 1999. It was as a plain text search. The flowchart to do the line wrap and hi-lights took 3 days. But it worked right off. Step one complete. Search and display text results. Next I added the ability to search text and call up pictures. If a match was found and the next line had the path to a picture then I displayed that picture. We scanned in and catalogued 5000+ family pictures and had that as a test base. Changes were made so it could run as a screen saver. Then with a random option, because sequential becomes very very boring. Then came video. The ability to play slow motion and freeze frame were two main features. I've had a mini dvd camcorder for 4 years now. This program makes computers and video fun. This is desktop search. to make this app a net search wouldn't be too tuff. instead of a picture it would be a url that would be loaded. To make this one scalable. Wouldn't be that hard either. I currently run it as a background job. 10,000 copies searching various parts of the search material, should do the trick. All my notes emails and net clippings since 1999 amount to 75M At 20,000,000 cps it takes just over 3 seconds. I have looked at some of the others. The more I looked the more I loved my desktop search. The thing I like most is that all my searches can be done in full text mode. With search, it is always the context one is looking for. I know the name "joe smith" when I search. It is his phone# or a person I met through him that I am interested in. Context context context. The other searches give you jibberish from their indexes before you see the real data. again very interesting stuff desktop search. Probably the most useful program on any computer. This search is so fast it will make you laugh.
Would it benefit you in any way to create multiple search engines to help rank your website higher in the other major search engines.
Just my 2 cents, but if you plan to use Google's free customized search engine, why not use Adsense for search? You can customize the result page, and it has a new feature now that you can have those results inside your website. This is kinda cool, and you stand a chance to earn some bucks too.