Jerry, before reading the fifthgate.org article above, my indexing was very cave-manish. (A database table containing a document id and a word, with queries to retrieve the list of documents built up as
select document_id from search_index where search_term = 'foo' intersect select document_id from search_index where search_term = 'bar' etc.)
Sounds like Swish-E could be a lot better. Compiling Swish++ initially was a pain (RH 6.2). Thanks for the link.