Is this a good price for a fully custom crawler search engine.

My earnings were more than remotely correct sweetfunny. That is why I just had to pay over $20k in taxes for last year only.

I got a job offer as a Sr. SEO at a large marketing company which pays very well, so I am not allowed to continue that business (at least not with full throttle) anymore because of potential conflict of interest. I was not pushing it 100% before this job because I was running several different businesses, like a computer store and on-site IT support which required my attention at that time. Though this is the truth, they are just excuses. I know I should have pushed my search engine business a little more. I got some offers to purchase it, but I did not sell because of a professional business evaluation which concluded that based on the potential in my search engine business, he estimated the negotiating value of $305,000. I guess the buyers thought that it wasn't worth that much after all or they found it too risky. But then I got this job, so I started neglecting my little search engines. Now I'm only running 3-4 out of the total 32 I used to run.

Living off of Internet businesses is very risky. You never know how much money your competition has to wipe you off of the face of the web. I'm not trying to discourage you NCDE302! It's your decision...

 

50k isn't unreasonable for a fully functional search engine. But do you realize the amount of hardware required to crawl the entire web?

Google's infrastructure is what truly makes them #1

 

There isn't much in the way of specifics.

But, if you mean a full bore search engine with capabilities and capacity to match any of the major search engines, $50K might buy you an architectural design. It's a drop in the bucket.

 

50K is a bargain I will be developing one soon and it is priced at millions.

 

IMO it is a total waste of money...spending an entire year's income on something that is already saturated and dominated by companies no single individual can ever catch up with. How long would it even take to break even?!

 

50K is a high price to pay for a search engine. Even if you did $5000 a month it would still take you about a year to get your money back. If you have 50K to spend there are other areas where you can get a better ROI.

 

After looking at the results from your Accelax search engine, I would have gotten out of the business as well.

 

Well, minimumrage.
If you looked at the results of Accelax Search, you also saw that it's only one month old. Did I forget to mention that I was running over 30 search engines? Though only 8 of them were making me all that money. I am only running two search engines now and only for about another month or so, because of the conflict of interest issue with my new job, so now I have to close down or sell the search engine business. Accelax search was my birthday present for myself. I only made it for fun and to test some SEO techniques on it. There were no ads on it until yesterday... I'm not sure where you got your stats from, but please check it again about a week from now. It will be very interesting. By the way, I'm not going out of business, but my new job is paying me way to well to risk a conflict of interest issue, so the business has to go.

Cheers,
Kris

 

Yeah, OK. So tell us again why you haven't named the search engines you ran?

 

I apologize for starting (or continuing?) an off-topic conversation on this thread.

I'm not sure what you mean minimumrage. I'm sorry.
Do you mean branding? The truth is that I was making money with my search engines because of pure SEO. I had no PPC ads, I didn't buy links, but depended on the traffic my sites were getting from other search engines. The SERPs were optimized so they would get crawled an indexed by other search engines and visitors found them when searching for something my pages had results for. About 10-15% of those visitors clicked on ads too. That's how I was making money. I started that search engine business about three years ago, when I created sites like websniffy.com and netsniffy.com which were getting about 20,000 unique visitors per day. I just had to make sure that I optimized pages with well-paying keywords better, so I was getting more for my traffic. Soon after setting up my second search engine, I was making more than enough to cover my mortgage and other expenses, so I closed my other businesses and depended on my search engines 100%. One of my old clients offered me to buy my entire search engine business so I stopped the work on those sites during the negotiations and as I was asking around if the offered amount was a good deal or not, I got other offers from other business owners as well. Most of these offers came with job offers as well as partnerships. So that's why/how I got out of the search engine game.
I guess the short answer to your question about branding is that I wanted to stay under the radar because my success was depending on my direct competition: the big players of the search engine industry which I knew I couldn't compete with. Instead, I was creating my own little layer, a money making machine to make a few bucks.

I hope, this answers your question. If not, please PM me any time and I'll do my best to satisfy your curiosity.

Cheers,
Kris

 

Are you paying him rent as well. Living costs etc, that is a lot of money to pay. You can get better coders at a fraction of the price

 

OK, but websniffy.com and netsniffy.com both redirect to accelax.com. Your results on Accelax are horrendous. All I'm trying to figure out is:

A) Based on the horrible results from Accelax.com (I mean, type in "digitalpoint", and see what shows up - completely irrelevant results) what qualifies you to speak on search engine design?

B) How in the world did you make 6 figures off of such a horrible engine? If you did, hats off. I just don't see how. But hey, more power to you.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to slam you, I'm just curious who would use such a search engine?

 

I stopped both websniffy.com and netsniffy.com almost a year ago. Accelax is something I just built for fun only a month ago. It's not near to be done and it has no purpose other than testing my SEO techniques on it. Even the ads did not exist on its pages until a few days ago when I decided to try to make a few bucks by monetizing the daily unique 500-600 visitors it's getting already which is not bad of a traffic for a thirty-some day old site. The traffic that is coming over from websniffy.com and netsniffy.com is nothing, because they haven't been online for a very long time, but if you look at the stats on Alexa, you can see how they used to perform:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/t...&w=700&range=3y&size=Large&url=websniffy.com/

I was never planning to build a search engine that could have become the next Google, Yahoo! or MSN. I just wanted to make some money, which I did. I actually made much more than I expected. That's why I think that $50k is not necessarily a bad price for a full search engine design depending on the details. I have no other purpose to post on this thread but to encourage NCDE302 to go ahead with his project, because my experience shows that you can make good money with even a relatively small search engine if it's done right. Even my crappy little Accelax is making ten bucks a day after spending about 2-3 hours of my time in total (when I set it up a month ago) and now it's making me money with no additional work. Now, imagine how well it could be doing if I (and/or a team of programmers and marketing people) actually spent some time on making it better (to provide better search results and work on branding and maybe some PPC advertising).

Any more questions, minimumrage?

Cheers,
Kris