a new search engine?
 

My friend and I have the idea to start a new search engine and email account site. So far the name we have been thinking most on is "Wowdoo". My friend is an experienced coder and is quite good eith things like this. However, i myself have some questions.

First off, i know that if we do the thing with the email accounts we will need a hella lot of space. Am i correct? and if so, how much?

Also, once we start getting alot of people comming and alot of traffic we will neded more bandwith. How much do you guys suggest?

As far as the emailing and search engine system is concerened, we pretty much have that covered. However, another thing we wanted to do is that gaming thing they have on yahoo in which you can play games against actualy people in a chat and stuff. How difficult is this? And do any of you guys know how to do it?

I myself will be helping most with the search engine and emailing system considering i am quite familiar with this. However, as far as all these other little things are concerned. Im just glad i have a friend that's good at coding and a bunch of coders who can support me from vb.com.

oh and my last question is for the future so i can start looking into it. Depending on how good we do, and if we do REAL REAL good then we might just go and try to make an instant messaging system. Now i know this is VERY difficult probably, my friend has some knowledge i believe. But eeeemmm How hard is this exactly and do any of you guys have experience with this?

What you have described is the kind of project that'll take a team of developers several years to accomplish.

yup

which is why i am looking for a team who is willing to invest his/her time an dedication to make a succesful site/business

My question to you is, why do you want to do this?

My question to you is, why not? ;]

Well first of all, you'll be completing with the worlds biggest organization which is about to integrate it's online search into it's future OS. Secondly the biggest search engine online offers more than you could possibly offer. Thirdly, why would anyone use your search engine when they can use google, yahoo, altavista, msn, dogpile etc which provide a better service?

And finally, gmail, spymac and many others (even hotmail) are offering large amounts of storage space and great features with their email service, which you couldn't possibly compete with.

You're going to have more than an uphill battle to make a success of a project like this I'm afraid. Even with some of the best marketers in the world on your side, you'd have to have some amazing programmers and also a large financial backing to sustain something like that :)

o ok,, uuummm now that you guys have shared your criticism, care to give me some advice and answers?

Find someone with a few billion dollars to back you then try :)

here we go again, so much for someone trying to do big things

anyone care to keep criticising?

Sure, I'll join in with this comment. If you have to ask the questions, you probably aren't ready to do the project. ;)

A search engine would require a ton of bandwidth and thousands of gigs of drive space to compete with the others. You will need an entire room full of servers to hold the search index alone.