"We are currently in the design stage, and have not written a line of LISP."
Your reaching out seems fairly premature...
"That is why I'm here. I would like to learn about your opinions before doing anything. As a collective, this group has a lot of knowledge about the language."
My opinion is that anyone who would spell "LISP" in all-uppercase doesn't know jackshit about Lisp. You should first target a particular dialect, as Lisp is a family of languages. Many here would strongly recommend Common Lisp, as I would. Magic recipe: Emacs/Slime/SBCL/Quicklisp. (I'm lazy.)
"Knowledge that will allow us to build a better search engine with LISP."
Well, good luck. First, go learn Common Lisp, and see you in a few years...