That's like if someone says "a car is $18,000, just make your own car," another person laughs and says "you don't really think you can build a street legal car from scratch without making a car company," and someone else saying "really, what do you estimate a car company would cost?"
It's completely unnecessary to make that estimate, a nonsense proposition since any two implementations are two orders of magnitude in cost apart, and a question that should never be asked of someone who hasn't done it.
Which is weird, because if you are who I think you are, you've done this in a trivial way, focusing on tiny sites.
And who knows? Maybe you're about to tell me that you've indexed several tens of thousands of pages yourself, that nobody's helping you, that it runs on two computers, and that it's Not That Difficult (tm).
Of course, then someone compares that engine to a practical search engine that also encompasses modern sites, and therefore needs to run tooled browsers to cope with their AJAX nonsense, and has to hit them every hour to be up to date.
And then you look at the disk cost.
Microsoft spends about $6 billion a year on Bing.
Duck Duck Go has more than 200 staff and raised $170+ million before their first profitable quarter
I think it's very easy for someone to put a homebrew HTML chess game on the phone store and then turn around and insist they know what it takes to run EA
I'm not disputing that you can sink inordinate amounts of money into a search engine, but on the flip side, I am running a search engine.
It indexes not tens of thousands of pages, but has a peak capacity of about 100 million documents. I can crawl over a billion documents per month.
I don't really see anyone suggesting competing with Google or Bing off a PC in your garage, but it is absolutely and demonstrably feasible to build complementary services without any budget at all.
It doesn't require huge numbers of developers, it doesn't require a small country's allotment of bandwidth, and it doesn't require data-centers full of prohibitively expensive hardware.
