anyone playing with http://nutch.org/
Well nutch makes no sense for you guys since it uses a webcrawler you don't need since you can simply index your database content. Lucene it definitely what you need!!!
If you one day decide to use java, let me know I can contribute a search engine for you. Anyway we never really got the wiki syntax parser done (we tried regex, neko and javacc) but all was just to bad and slow results. To index en wikipedia content uses 4 h on a dual os x. My prototype search engine is able to answer more then 10 queries per second with less then 50 CPU usage on dual g5.
So, discuss the java issue and let me know. :-)
Stefan