Challenge HN: Build a Search Engine

Before HN went down there were 2 articles that made it to the front page in as many days with comments overwhelmingly favoring more/better search engine competition.

Today another post popped up on the front page of HN...this time a link to a new search engine. Predictably, the comments are overwhelmingly negative, not constructive criticism, but mostly thoughtless (e.g. this will not work; not another social network; this has been done before and bought/closed by Google). To be fair there was a sprinkling of positive and thoughtful critique in the comments.

So...I challenge you to do better. Who am I to judge or challenge? Well I will say this much, I am an attorney and otherwise what HN would refer to as "non-technical", but even I launched my own search engine (cir. 2010). I might not have changed search or even gained traction - I did get tens of thousands of search queries from day 1 and a record of 225,000+ on day 4 - but at least I got the experience of completing something.

If a non-hacker can do it, what is stopping you? If it helps for motivation think of this as an unofficial, unorganized HN Hackathon and build your search engine or at least do not just sit around demanding a new search engine or worse yet tearing down others work (again not talking about constructive criticism).