Yuntis is a fully-functional prototype of a complete web search engine with features comparable to those available in commercial-grade search engines. In particular, Yuntis supports page quality scoring based on global web linkage graph, extensively exploits text associated with links, computes pages' keywords and lists of similar pages of good quality, and provides a very flexible query language. This paper reports our experiences in the three-year development process of Yuntis, by presenting its design issues, software architecture, implementation details, and performance measurements.