> 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