Only down-side to perl only version is speed. Of course, it depends on size of your input data. However, on my laptop I have more data that I want to index than any perl-only solution really can handle (over 20Gb in various formats).

I have some expiriences with WAIT (and some pending patches at http://svn.rot13.org/~dpavlin/svnweb/index.cgi/wait/log/trunk/ ), swish-e, Xapian (another great engine which updated perl bindings few days ago). I also experimented with CLucene perl bindings and finally ended with HyperEstraier.

I would suggent to make list of requirements of search engine and then select right one. My current list include:

• full text search
• filter results by attributes (e.g. date, category...)
• ability to update index content while running searches on it
• wildcard support (or substring, even better!)
• acceptable speed on projected amount of data

Last point influence choice very much. I would go with Plucene if data size is small enough (or only for prototyping).

Writing good parsers and analyzers for input formats (do you want to rank bold words more than surround text?) and font-end is hard enough without writing own reverse index implementation, especially since some very good allready exist.

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