Looks like you guys didn't read the whole story. The professor specifically asked the class not to search online. The goal of the homework was to get the students to teach them to think through the puzzle.
How is this different from historious? I use historious and instapaper to save bookmarks and read later, and I am extremely happy with the service. I might jump in if your service provided features of both, ie: indexing my bookmarks and making it available on my kindle.
Also do you provide bookmarklets instead of the firefox plugin? It would be easier for those of us who use multiple machines and may not be able to install plugins on all.
I do like the idea of indexing content other than just webpages, like youtube videos, rss , twitter etc. Does your system handle Twitter and RSS updates also?
I will be back with more feedback after I start using the service.
I use my HTPC at home as a server for my SVN and sites which haven't started making money for me yet. What I like about this setup is that I can deploy large amounts of data in an instant. I have a mostly static site with a few million pages I plan to update daily.
More importantly, now I can justify paying for the fast internet connection and keeping the PC running 24hrs.
The problem area is keeping backups. My server is a retired P4 I got from ebay for $50, which is not really reliable. I had to go through the pain of setting up all my backup scripts, which I guess I would have to do any way.
The P4 has enough processing power to handle all my sites' traffic while I'm watching youtube on it.
I also use the server to download anything and everything I need. It also serves as a file server and hosts some of my personal ssh tunnels and proxies.
Having said that, I would recommend using a home server unless you really don't want to spend money on hosting or if you are worried about bandwidth caps. Start ups can benefit from a home server, but plan to movie it to a real server once you start growing. Don't invest on home server hardware or try to upgrade. What you already have is probably good enough.