The project involves building a full portal site like yahoo / google / msn with multiple features.
Design should be MVC with all features / business logic exposed as services. Home page should be completely customizable with features selected from Admin panel / by user like MyYahoo. The functionality / services should use json wherever possible. This service layer will have services that use several API including bing api, yahoo boss api, google search api, google maps, openstreetmap, youtube, flickr, daylife, AP, foursquare, Piratebay, Imdb, Indeed, 8coupons, Nestoria, Amazon, ebay, craigslist, etsy, hotwire, bestbuy, facebook, twitter etc. The idea is the site should have most of the services that yahoo has / google has and uses 3rd party api extensively for this. Each service is a full featured portal with its database schema and if there is no data in cache / db, it should call 3rd party API. The site should also have bookies / betting odds search functionality similar to [login to view URL]
In case where needed / where there is no API / where there is serious limit on API, you should write scraper. All services should have admin panel which is used to configure what API I want to use. Every API call should follow an insert into that respective database. Every search / lookup should first look in cache (cache could be memcached / redis) and caching is MUST.
The product / script that is similar to this functionality is inoutportal from [login to view URL] , but that is poorly designed and sloppy.
I can give you the exact design and complete specs. you should be able to build portals which include most of functionality from above API's.
C# / Asp. Net MVC / Web API is preferred although PHP is also fine. MySQL is the database, you should be good at designing complex schemas. Memcached / Redis should be used.
Features - Search - web, images, news, video, dictionary,files, twitter,torrents, itunes
News - news from various sources including daylife, AP and should have all sections like finance, entertainment etc.
Betting - betting odds search and compare similar to sbrforum/betting-odds
Shopping - shopping search using amazon, ebay, etsy
Torrents - torrent search thru scraping or API
Movies - site like imdb
Classifieds - oodle, craigslist
Places - google maps, openstreetmap, foursquare
Real estate - similar to classifieds with different data source like nestoria
QnA / Forums - like stack overflow
Video - video site using youtube / vimeo integration
Travel - ?
Weather - should be on home page based on IP / user settings
Home - a mix of services choosen in admin panel with customizable layout
Users - should have personalized experience after logging in, single log in for all services.
MyXXXX - myYahoo type functionality tied to user, user can be able to save any link / image / video / text like bookmark / faves.
He should see his services / his faves / his saved searches / items etc. etc.
Graphics / Design - Metro UI, consistent look and feel through out. customizable through admin panel, use chromeless player only, html5 look