I think you're probably seeing differences due to the overhauled and much improved implementation of psql. Can you post an example of what you're seeing? I've not run the regression tests since my early pre-beta snapshot.
We should be able to kludge up some sort of full text search capability without too much effort, but it will be slow and I don't know if anyone is working on it at present. Longer-term, adding a smarter, indexed search capability is something I have a personal interest in. Probably will be late summer or fall before I can get to it. There's a simple implementation of such a scheme in the contrib section of Postgres, and PLS at least has some modules that could be used (stemming routines, etc) even though it isn't supported under Linux. I haven't really investigated this problem in any detail yet.
