I have a complex crm db schema and I need to support google-style type-ahead searching that will search a number of different columns from a number of different tables with joins involved etc. I was therefore considering building some sort of cached text search facility. I noticed sphinxsearch and lucene and wondered if anyone had any words of wisdom on using these in a .NET context, or whether there are any other open source offerings or alternative design patterns that people might recommend. I have tried MS Full Text and been disappointed by it so I'm looking for alternatives. Thanks very much.
For info, Lucene looks very good in testing - we'll probably use it.