Don't bother - either way, the existing search system sucks. Majorly.
The entire problem is that it reads the ENTIRE search index into memory before searching.
Meaning that if you have a 4 meg search index, it gets turned into ~20-40 megs of memory before the search begins.
Many hosts simply kill any process that uses that much memory...
If you're going to do ANYTHING to the search, you'd might as well propose a complete rewrite. That's not totally out of the question either.
