As a general rule, these sites have no real paying advertisers and no traffic, so the business proposition is not that different from starting from scratch. Other than having the minimal site up and running, you are effectively starting new. If it is a SmartSearch site, you can fairly easily find programmers to add features to it, and so on, so you are not necessarily locked in to the starting point for the long term.

One caveat: some of these sites can come with liabilities. If they have been giving out free accounts to new advertisers (now the standard practice), they may have several hundred -- or even thousand -- dollars of liability to those advertisers. Seems like no big deal, but if you sign up affiliates and the affiliates drive clicks to those accounts, you are going to have to pay real American money to your affiliates, even though you took no real American money in. Be sure to count that in the cost of your acquisition, because as a practical matter you will not get traffic without first having affiliates. (One otherwise nice little site I looked at had tens of thousands of dollars of such liability accrued, which meant that the real cost of acquisition would come down the road when affiliates started driving clicks.)

Another potential cost is unpaid payments due to affiliates, as noted above. The seller should clear those out before the sale, but do not assume that has been done. Even though you could tell the affiliates that you just acquired the assets, not the liabilities, assuming the sale is structured that way, and send them off to collect from the seller, it's pretty tough to build a business if you start off by letting your business partners be stiffed.

The sites that you are referring to on ebay generally offer little more than the a cgiscript and a template. You will still need to generate traffic.

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I disagree with Bloonatic. If you are going to be serious about this then you will want to have the proper search technology. if you are rely on a cobrand search then you have no control over how the searches are run. Essentially you become a glorified affiliate. Fine for the hobbyist, but not recommended for the serious search engine business person.

My Opinion: Use the best technology you can find. We used several of the available script packages available before I found one that did what I wanted, had the support I wanted and allowed me to customize as I wanted.

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Ray offers you some sound advice. You will want affiliates but they can be a major hurdle if the accounting is "upside down" or the program was mis managed.

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I think that you will learn that almost anyone can take a commercially evailable script and slap a snazzy looking template on it and call it a search engine, there are many of them listed on the auction sites. but it takes time and dedication to develop an engine that actually makes money. Finding those gems is much more difficult.

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Personally, I prefer to start from scratch. I have a method that works for me and I have been successful several times. However I do know about one or two search engines that I would be willing to purchase. But you won't find them listed on ebay and they are worth quite a bit more than $100.

Jeff Brown

Does anyone on this board know, or currently run an SE with this software. Before I spend thousands of dollars I would like to look at some finished products....

The old (2000-2001) Euroseek.com used to process millions of searches every day and I'm pretty sure they used Hyperseek. That is a pretty good field test.

Kevin1969,
Another script you may have a look at is LinksSQL by Gossamer-Threads.

I agree with Jeff's comments about hard work, dedication and investing money in a top software program.

We are a Search Engine that was designed using John Cokos's Hyperseek/Jackhammer Software Programs. We cannot say enough about the advantages of these programs and John's ongoing support and dedication to our Search Engine's ever-changing needs.

Yes, these programs cost quite a bit more than the low cost programs out there but our advertisers are provided with many necessary tools to make their campaigns easy to manage and hopefully more successful. In our eyes, John Coko's support and his programs are worth every penny that we have spent!

I would say that despite John the author working on a new version it already does everything we want, you can add and modify sites at will, directly influence the relevancy factors and thosuands of more things.

We don't use Jackhammer though, instead we run a media kit that offers paid inclusion for a nominal fee and we run an affiliate programme that is separate from the Jackhammer product.

However if we ever chose to operate our own PPC facility then we would probably extend Hyperseek with Jackhammer and have it customised how we wanted it to run. Hyperseek has been around for a good few years in various versions, most web sites that use it and have stuck with it long enough to understand it will probably choose it over anything else. Same with Jackhammer, its been around long enough for all the major issues and bugs to have been dealt with. Plus some major sites use it and if they had problems we would probably know by now. Yes its expensive, but serious PPC is not for hobbyists and generally it is worth paying for quality in such a business.