There are several possible paths to a better search engine (which we know isn't adequate). Two possibly synergistic efforts include an in-database search engine being developed by folks who run a Russian portal. If someone's interested in tracking this down and evaluating it both for usability and completeness (i.e. are they done yet?) e-mail me. I know that to make it work very well on their portal site they had to make a change to the PG core's optimization and evaluation of limit that Tom Lane didn't like all that well. They were going to work together for a reasonable 7.2 solution last I heard. Might be worth checking into.
The other possibility is swish++ or something similar. There was someone working on a swish++ module for OpenNSD but I don't know how far they got. This wouldn't be the hard part, the hard (but not terribly hard) part would be to rewrite swish++ so it would take and index content from dynamic content generated via URL as well as from files.
Swish++ has some phrase-based search capability, unlike the older swish. The older swish wouldn't really be significantly better than the current search function (in terms of the search results, it would return equally bad results much more quickly though).
