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Comment by RealGeek | Hacker News Reader

Play with Google CSE and build niche search engine http://www.google.com/cse/

I built a nifty search engine using Google CSE API over a weekend. It got over 30,000 unique visitors per day and made $2,000 per month.

It was probably one of the most advanced search engine built on Google CSE.

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Made? What happened to it?

After running for a year on Google CSE. I built my own search platform and was able to grow it to over 100,000 visitors per day.

How much are you making now?

At it's peak, I made $15,000 per month.

Then I pulled the plug, because most of the users were using it to search movies and music. I had no legal troubles, but I did not want to stay in the gray area.

Can I have URL of your service?

The name of search engine was ShareMiner, it was very popular. The website is now dead, but you can read about it at:

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/shareminer-search-web-files/

http://www.killerstartups.com/Search/shareminer-com-search-t...

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2008/01/pl...

How did you got the traffic?

I built the search engine, then I bought a crappy website which had 20,000 visits per day. It was just a form which redirected to Google.com and it looked like this: http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1602/pl_playlis...

Then I launched my version of search engine on the same domain, the new version ran on our own platform and looked like this: http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/images/shareminer-file-search.p...

After launch of new version, I was able to grow the traffic organically and with SEO.

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