A few years ago I used a really nice search engine script from fluid dynamics....
http://www.xav.com/scripts/search/
The script was great but very very limited in the amount of websites you could add and used up way too much CPU. It was good though for what I was doing at the time, the problem was the guy stopped development on the script.
I think what I would like to do is move in stages, start with a small project so I can learn, then move into something bigger later on.