I've already got a simple keyword-style search hack working on my laptop (did it yesterday afternoon at the 'ole coffeeshop over an iced Americano). It is a redo of the original search kludge used on photo.net and in the ACS until Context/Intermedia came along, using a simple ranking procedure (written at the moment in PL/pgTCL) called from a query on the bboard.
I think it will suffice as a stopgap measure - ONLY as a stopgap measure, but one that photo.net used for quite a long time and was certainly much better than nothing at all. It requires a single sequential scan on bboard content, and can also be used to search other tables (news, for instance) as well.
I plan to make this available in the next few days so folks can play with it.
I've looked at swish/swish++ and a couple of other options. Ben and I seem to agree that an out-of-database solution would be best. In-database solutions tend to be slow (Intermedia is slow, at least), and requires you stuff all your static pages into the database if you want to support a single integrated search facility.
An out-of-database indexer can always reindex everything if the index gets corrupted, so the normal ACID paranoia can be ignored for such a tool. As long as the database holding content isn't trashed, you can rebuild the search index.
However, I'd like to integrate more closely than the approach you suggest would indicate.
I may make some progress on a more permanent solution before leaving at the end of the month to band hawks in Nevada (I'll be gone virtually all of September), but am not sure.
