> Right. The Google 'big' index isn't so big. The average load/machine
> isn't quite high. But in which time frame can you implement all the
> things needed to do this (ie. including inter-server replication)?

I guess you have understood me wrong - there's no point to compete
Google and we're not interested in handling millions of requests on 8
billion-document big database. Therefore no replication is needed. And
even if we had such code in place, it would be useless to almost any
our customer, since people are not ready to invest so much money into
hardware.

> BTW, I don't want to compete Google, for the site of my institution
> I rather prefer to have them to search my site which has a far
> better search engine than I can build in ten years, I only want to
> bring some very handful features in a reasonable amount of time to
> my users (doesn't matter if their applications are desktop based or
> web based, they have FB relational data as back end).

There are already components that do exactly such thing (see for
example FastTextSearch or components shipped with IBObjects).

> But, again, if you have plenty of development resources why you
> don't port and/or adapt to engine Lucene and/or OpenFTS
> (http://openfts.sourceforge.net/features.shtml)? These are quite
> mature and with many advanced features.

There's some issue with these two projects - they are written in Java.
And additionally, using Lucene with Firebird requires some fixes for
BLOB handling (implement seek for temporary blobs). The C++ port of
Lucene is not yet complete and I doubt it will ever be completed -
more likely is that gcj-compiled library will be used instead. I have
little experience with OpenFTS but their API was quite similar to Lucene.

But the worst thing are the resources. We don't have them and
therefore this feature is not yet implemented. I had a running
implementation of Firebird-based Directory for Lucene that uses BLOBs
for storage for more than 2 years and have pretty good idea how to
merge Lucene with FB. But I have no time to do it myself. If you're
interested in doing this job, contact me privately and we can discuss
it further.

Roman