Selling Selling a discussion board search engine (the best one ever made)

I am selling www.hollilla.com, my ongoing pet project of five years. Alternatively I am looking for somebody that is willing to buy in.

hollilla.com is a search engine built specifically to index discussion boards. But how it actually does it is the secret ingredient. The site is able to mirror any board (no rss bullshit) completely in a manner which enables it to show an exact copy of the board at hollilla.com. This means that everything, messages, timestamps and nicknames are preserved including individual discussion topics and subforums as well. And it is very well optimized, since it knows exactly what it is indexing, so it uses less bandwidth than any other type of search engine.

Of course mirroring copyrighted content would be stupid, but the power hollilla.com yields lies elsewhere: it is a very powerful tool for data mining and keyword alerts. It is also much faster than Google for this type of operation, thanks to its proprietary indexing algorithm.

Now, the site is yet to see its full potential. I have implemented it in Finnish ( as it is my mother tongue ) but this applies only for the user interface. The actual search engine is 100% compatible with English language too and the only situation where it needs to understand any languages is when it is interpreting certain kind of timestamps. Partial support for German and Swedish languages have been implemented too.

Some details about the search engine:
- Impletented in PHP - supports multiprocessing AND multithreading via PHP pthreads.
- Inbuilt features for useragent obfuscation and proxies
- uses a MySQL database
- The search feature is provided by Sphinx Open source search server
- Currently holds about 300 000 000 indexed messages
- Indexes 635 discussion boards at the moment ( and can easily do a lot more, if operation is scaled down by allowing only paying customers to access or alternatively moving the service to more powerful hosting solution ).
- Is hosted by a single server: Intel Xeon 1231v3, 32GB DDR3, WD RE4 2TB, Crucial M550 ( server is included if you buy the site )

Some facts about the website:
- 136 500 unique visitors in the last 30 days.
- A general search feature ( best matches, newest, oldest, most positive (sentiment), most negative (sentiment) )
- Has ability to list classified ads and enables users to search them ( currently lists ads from 281 different forums )
- Users have ability to register and get email notifications of search keywords they have defined. The site will automatically notify them when something new appears. Currently this is limited to classified ads.
- Has ability to index pictures and offers a search feature for them
- Has ability to show which discussion topics get the most amount of new posts
- Can list posts by nickname
- Automatically shows discussion topics that have been removed from original locations ( there is a section for these )

The site has other features too, but I feel the most important ones are listed above.

Why are you selling this site?
I am attending university which keeps me quite busy. This site however is way too big of an invention to just be shut down. I am 100% sure there is a person who is able to monetize the search engine by creating a subscription based system (data analytics, opinion mining, keyword alerts) for english speaking markets. I am more of a tech guy. Also, I have zero business contacts outside Finland.

How is it monetized?
I've sold some advertising space ( not actively, people have reached me ) and very easily covered the running costs that way.

But the real potential is surely in elsewhere than in advertising.

Does this site come with any social media accounts?
No.

How much time does this site take to run?
In its current state, very little. The search engine is semi-automated, you have to manually define the forums that are indexed but after that it knows what to do.

What challenges are there with running this site?
The new owner has to come up with monetization/subscription system to fully benefit from the search engine's features. If you know how to do this and know how to market this kind of product in the English speaking markets, it is easy money. The site has aroused a lot of interest in my home country because of its usefulness, but unfortunately I lack the necessary skills to market this kind of website where it counts.

If you are interested or have any tips, do not hesitate to PM me. Alternatively you can send email to

P.S. The price may seem high for sure, but that is until you ask a software company how much it would cost to buy one from them.