Regarding a flexible, driver based search interface for AOLserver and the ACS, I agree, that would be a very nice thing. I was thinking last night that it would be pretty easy to hook up the SWISH engines with a database driver, but that doesn't really get anyone anything. It would be an easy thing to do to make a variant of the database driver interface to fit any search engine, and the initial SWISH APIs look like a good model: with ns_search instead of ns_db, we might have openindex, specify search, getmatch (a looping construct like ns_db's getrow), closeindex, and maybe geterror and some others such as getMatchDetail which might take a document id that has been matched and return an ns_set of properties.
But that appears to be only one half the coin. The other half is an ACS module API. It would be great if a interface/program could be made specifying module callbacks (much like the ad_new_stuff does.)
I don't have enough experience with these search programs yet to know the right form of the interface, but presumably each module could provide a callback function that would take a package id, a date, and optionally a "cursor" cookie (that was returned from the prior call.)
