I second your observation, though my recent foray into Lucene was far simpler. I used the RAMDirectory feature to build an index in memory for a large list of

I second your observation, though my recent foray into Lucene was far simpler. I used the RAMDirectory feature to build an index in memory for a large list of names (and our queries go through a thick OR/M). The user of the application needs to be able to filter the list by keywords and doing the query each time was taking too long (2 or 3 seconds). It's now near instantaneous. I think for 10,000 documents (two fields: name and id) it takes 20 seconds to build the index in Lucene .NET. I had always heard of using Lucene for really large datasets and thought it might be overkill for speeding up a somewhat small part of one application dialog. In reality it took a single reference to the Lucene .NET dll and a few functions to build the documents and add them to the index.