Let me paint the landscape and attempt to explain what I'm tasked to do.  I have an idea of where I'm heading but before I make the journey I need to consult some brains who may have travelled this way before.  Imagine the Content nodes as follows:

It's more complicated than the image, but I'm hoping it gets the point across.  The actual page that is rendered (Page with Merged Children) doesn't have really any content other than the title and some navigational options.  It's paired with a template that reads the child nodes and outputs a combined rendering.  I'm cool with all that as I can have the search results bubble up until it reaches a proper template alias similar to a blog post with comments.  However, here's the twist.  The child may have a field that picks a node outside the site tree (think of a common disclaimer shared on many pages). I'm pretty sure I will need to index the rendering moreso than the field data since portions of the data is outside the site heirarchy.  Anyone else run into this challenge and what approach did you do??  If I were to render the page, could I store it in a custom field on the index?? (I'm refering to this blog post as inspiration)  Dig deep gurus, I need a sip of some creative thinking juices.