Well done with luteus! My point is that it is essential to understand the basics of the identification process before you are able to find something new. And it is also vital to understand what Tom Jones very nicely clarified to see the real perspective. However, “determined” and “not giving up” are also very good characteristics for a scientist. A very good starting point as well.
I would like to set a question this way: Let’s assume you will find a novel and previously unknown microbe species. Now, then what? Is it interesting? Is it ecologically important? Or does it produce some new antibiotics or some other valuable biochemical? Is it a pathogen? Finding and characterization of a novel species is valuable as such of course. However, what scientists mainly aim at is to produce new information. So how about broaden the perspective a little and putting the question the other way: could you study some previously known microbe to find something new? Many microbe species, though they are known, are not so well characterized. This way you would already have some solid ground under your feet. Yet you could be able to find something new information and that process could be even more rewarding than finding a previously unknown species. Or you might eventyally find a new species as a fortunate by-product of this research.
For publication searches this is the main source scientists use:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
However, this database is mainly for biomedical and life science resource and there may be some zoology journals which are not indexed there. The other very useful site is this:
https://www.researchgate.net/ and maybe also this:
https://www.academia.edu/
Many articles are not open access but you may write to the corresponding author and ask a copy. This can be done either sending email to corresponding author or sending a request in researchgatenet where you may find some articles being available anyway. University libraries should be able to give you temporary password for their internet access so you can download articles there.
As you read articles, you will see that most of them have at least three to five authors. We are not living the days of Barbara McClintock any more and publishing a research article usually needs co-operation of several people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Again, this is to bring some reality: even experienced scientists with a wide network of co-operation and institutional support have difficulties to get their results published. However, I know cases of a single author publication and it is always possible to do research for hobby without publishing. Sadly, any research, no matter how well it is done, is not scientifically valid before it has been published.
About the microscope: I have very little experience with Olympus and never used this model. As far as I understand it looks very nice and it is well presented in Ebay which suggests that the seller has inspected it carefully. Probably a good choice.