I run a few mediawiki's, and so far the search that comes with it has been adaquate. For other sites I have experimented with CLucene, htdig, and maybe some ot

I run a few mediawiki's, and so far the search that comes with it has been adaquate. For other sites I have experimented with CLucene, htdig, and maybe some others. A decent search can be put together in the course of a couple of days of careful attention. Do you think that your current problem could be the basis of a paid-for service ? I.e., if you could pay a monthly or per-use fee, give credentials to a service that would then access the private data you wanted indexed, and then provide the search functionality in a way that only your server could fetch it (and then re-display it to the authenticated user), would you buy it ? I have also thought about using open source software to make a search appliance similar to google's, and selling them or selling an installer CD that would configure an old PC to be one.