Price Comparison Website Questions

[Neko]

I have an idea for a price comparison website (pcw) that would focus on a niche area that I don't believe currently has a good pcw. There is a lot of money being spent in this niche and prices often vary wildly from one online vendor to the next so I believe the potential to create a useful, profitable (from affiliate programs and maybe adsense) website is fairly good.

(For an example of the type of site I'd be interested in creating see http://www.addall.com/ a book price comparison engine.)

Couple questions:

1. Does anybody have any personal experience with price comparison sites? If you do, do you mind sharing your experience a bit?

2. Any links to where I can learn about setting up a website like this?

3. What are peoples opinions on the profitability of this type of website in general?

4. I would like to build the site myself mostly for the learning experience. My goal would be to spend anywhere from 1 to 15 hours a week on the site and have it up and running by the end of the year. I am a competent self taught programmer and have experience in a number of different languages but only a small amount of html/javascript/php experience (since I work as a computational scientist most of my experience is in C/C++/Fortran). With my goal in mind would this be foolish? Would I be much better off hiring someone to build the site myself?

Thanks for any info you can provide me!