> A couple of points about Lucene features, in reply to Karen: Lucene does
> do stemming natively, in the analyser (use the PorterStemFilter class,
> which is part of the Lucene distribution).
...
> http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html

It was this documentation that I was relying on for stemming info--but I'm
not technical enough to know to look elsewhere. I knew it *worked* with
Porter stemming, which is gudenuff.

> I agree that what were once bells and whistles are now essential to the
> kind of search interface we need to build. My sense is that Lucene has
> the machinery to do just about everything you need in a good modern
> search interface, but it's up to the implementation to put all the
> pieces together.

Yes indeed! One thing I've learned from working with search specialists is
that the innards of search engines tend to be basically the same--it's the
assembly that makes all the difference.

Peter, in a real-world bench test for a more typical search engine and more
typical search engine user, I'm not sure fuzzy match can work well, even
"tuned." but if stemming or light pluralization meets user needs--well
again, it's gudenuff. :)

Karen