I used Paice Husk stemming for my search engine and used MLDBM and Storable for creating the index. I also used a second index to cache the HTML meta data.

I quite liked Paice Husk as it translated to Perl very easily. I just had to keep the rules in an array and reverse all fragments of my search terms.

If you want an alternative to Lingua::Stem then I seriously recommend it. You can find the paper here They also give an (old) Perl example which should help provide a basis of your app if you choose to try it.