I've built custom search engines using Lucene before -- http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html -- problem

I've built custom search engines using Lucene before -- http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html -- problem is that you have to build a lot of extra stuff to make it work for your scenarios. Wikipedia lists a ton of sites that rely on Lucene: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucene You might also want to look at Solr -- I haven't tried it, but sounds like you have to make less special sauce to get it running. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solr Ferret is actually a port of Lucene to Ruby. If I were engineering something, I'd probably want to use Facebook Thrift to make my searches a service that can be called from anywhere -- just use the Java Thrift binding on top of a Lucene process, and then call into it from my web app.