I am at a new company and one of our goals is to implement a document search portal for our team and our clients. I am a bit worried that if we use an external service provider like Salesforce or some other ECM in the cloud there will be a lot of integration work in the future. From a client perspective, these documents will also exist in the same bucket as our structured content (stored in the DB, not a MS Word doc).
If you have implemented document searching, what languages, frameworks, and technologies have you used? Do you have any failure stories? I don't have a problem using something out of the box, but I think it is important that we have control over the documents and the API to access them. I would like to use Rails if we go fully custom.
Depending on your licensing needs Lucene (LGPL) and Xapian (GPL) both are great, mature, fast search engine API's with bindings for a lot of languages. I've used both of them with great success.