[rbrown46]

I tried to get into Lucene (using SOLR) recently but was put off by it's complexity for what was, in my case, a simple use case (searching through a large document set of html, txt, and doc files quickly using proximity search).

After futzing for hours with XSLT and writing scripts to submit content via the REST API, I found out about FTS4 in SQLite, and was impressed by it's relative simplicity. I had something working in under an hour in Python.

[fizx]

Wait, what!? You have at least two good options for Solr libaries in Python, neither of which brings you anywhere close to xslt.

- http://haystacksearch.org/ - http://code.google.com/p/pysolr/

[nzadrozny]

Also, Sunburnt: https://github.com/tow/sunburnt/

[ericmoritz]

This may be beyond your the scope of your needs but Riak Search <http://wiki.basho.com/Riak-Search.html>; is pretty easy to use, is distributed and elastic. As a bonus you have Riak laying around if you need an awesome K/V store.

[lepht]

Seconded. I heartily recommend anyone with even a slight interest in Riak to check out the Riak Fast Track:

http://wiki.basho.com/The-Riak-Fast-Track.html

It's a quick, interesting, and to the point into to Riak, including theory, installation, and usage. The Basho guys have seriously great documentation, I've enjoyed browsing through the Riak wiki despite not really having any live Riak deployments.

[notJim]

I used SOLR for a site about a year ago, and I was absolutely shocked at how little documentation there was, and how low quality the existing documentation was. Everything was spread out over some awfully-maintained wiki that seemed to have no logical organization. Ugh, what a nightmare.