[BBLISA] Site search engines recommendations

[Alex Aminoff]

We are considering installing a search engine for our web site 
(nber.org). At the moment we use Google Custom Search heavily modified. 
Years ago we had a Google Search Appliance, which was OK but not what we 
really want. Here is the current one:

http://admin.nber.org/custom

Perhaps this is the wrong place for this question? Is there a different 
group that would be better?

The current front-runners in this space appear to be Lucene and Xapian. 
Those are search libraries, on top of which one can develop one's own 
search engine, or use publically available search engines that were 
built on top, like Nutch or Omega respectively.

Other search engines or libraries that we looked at, some of which 
appear unpopular or minimally developed, others not designed for what we 
want:

Sphinx
Lemur/Indri
mnogosearch
swish-e/++
zettair

Key desired features are perl bindings/API and the ability to set up 
search by date, or heavily weighted by date.

Thanks for any suggestions,
  - Alex Aminoff
    NBER