What strategy would you take to build a search engine today?
charlesju: Search is a function of 2 problems:1. Mainstream Search
- This is the search for information that a lot of people want to know. Britney Spears, How good is the new transformer's movie, 1 + 1 = ?, etc. I think I would just go through slowly and optimize each page to show results from the various information portals on the web, then make competing websites bid for positions. ie. list game reviews  from gamespot, ign, etc. with rotten tomatoe's algorithm.2. Long Tail Search
- This is random information throughout the web. I don't think there is a better way to aggregate this data than what traditional search engines are doing. Perhaps look into more advanced spam filtering algorithms, but that's a tweak, not a feature revolution.
- Probably just use something like Yahoo Boss to get started