On the search engine note, go to hotscripts.com and look through their PHP scripts for search engines. There's one on there that's tailored to the adult industry and it's really well built.
On the industry itself, I worked for world wide media group (peepshow.com, only18.net and 900 or so other adult sites at the time) - and I worked for globix where we hosted general media (penthouse magazine)
Peepshow made a lot of money with their own chicks/guys/trannies that no one could find anywhere else. We had 50k+ users. We stopped doing that cuz good old ted thought it would be better just to outsource the feeds. We lost 40k+ users in 3 months, because they could see the same thing everywhere else and not pay 30/mo for it.
Penthouse didn't have to spend money on advertising, but they also had so much traffic that they had to have 2x100 meg lines from us and 3 full racks of equipment... just at our location. Not counting what they had in house, and not counting their entire staff in house, they spent well over 250K/mo on hosting and managed services.
The adult industry is tricky. If you find a good angle that's fine, in fact, check out
http://www.streamworxvod.com, they have some cool DRM streaming software
for the search thing too, if you can afford to put some money down, look at jackhammer (hyperseek) search engine
http://www.iwebsoftware.com
This software kicks ass but you will pay for it. John Kokos means business, I have seen this baby tested and it rocks. I think it runs the sex.com search, btw.
If you have any specific questions about the pr0n industry, feel free to ask. It's not taboo, it's definitely a real market, but it's also a very saturated market. If I can't answer it, I know people who can. I know the guy that wrote the first dialer.exe scripts (no I won't give out his addey for people to hunt him down and kill him.. heh), he developed megawhores.com and I know the guy who bought penthouse (marc bell) because he used to be the owner of globix. You guys can go hunt him down if you want cuz he's a scumbag =)
With a domain name like that, and all the features and changes you have told us about, I'm sure ya gonna do well!
