I am looking for a search engine that can be used for sites. Sometimes we dont want to use google embedded search or the complication of lucene.
I run in to these requests:
Crawl based search
Rating and ranking of content based on content types
Searching documents like pdf and docs etc..
I dont mind if it is a commercial control that we have to purchase but I would like to be able to integrate it nicely in to some of these use cases
I have used dtSearch in the past which I know has a web crawler built into it. It doesn’t come with a front end control though, it’s strictly a search engine. You need to write your own results control. It does have a powerful query language though that lets you score on multiple dimensions depending on how you set up your indexes. It also has a decent .NET API to work with.
I don’t know that this is any less complicated than Lucene though. So then I start to wonder what complications you are hoping to avoid.