About 6 months before I launched something, which was really a MVP, if that. I've invested in infrastructure, but not a ton. I crawl some from the cloud and some from my own machines.
I classify it as a search engine. I'm in to doing whatever produces the best results. I started with my own crawler before BOSS existed and then switched that piece to it (highly modified of course) to concentrate on where the marginal benefit lies. Techcrunch initially classified it as a "hybrid search engine," so maybe that is a better term?
