How Realistic is it for someone to Compete with their own search engine?

[DeluxeNames]

I was just curious if you guys know any Webmasters with their own search engines that are successful? Tell me what search engines you guys might have created?

Do you think it's possible to make your own search engine be able to compete against the likes of Google and Yahoo? How could you beat them at their own game?

It's not something I would try but when I was younger I made www.Seekzilla.com into a search engine that used SearchFeed for it's results and thought it could be a profitable venture. That went nowhere and now Seekzilla falls in line and uses Google.

[Nuvo]

Unfortunately, unless you happen to have an indexing system that outdoes googlebot and his little friends, you wouldn't get very far in the general search market.
I had a web directory which I coded from scratch in PHP at one point.
It was pretty good and used fulltext searching, but I stopped bothering with it and I don't know what I did with the code.

[daboss]

you must be kidding right? :)

there are more than 50 phd propellor heads over there at google tweaking and improving the search engine routines... and the infrastructure that google has in place cannot even be rivalled by microsoft who has deep pockets.