One of the core team members has released an add-in called Umbraco Examine which is a Lucene indexer for Umbraco (http://umbracoexamine.codeplex.com/).

The documentation is a bit lacking at the moment, you may need to look into the 4.1 release package for umbraco (as Examine is being included in that).

Essentially you need to just specify in the web.config the doc types and their properties to index and Examine does the rest

Any news as to when more documentation is going to be released on this? I have download the files but I'm not too sure how I make use of them, as in how I create a search page etc that is capable of searching through Umbraco pages and the text in uploaded documents. I am currently using XSLT Search.

The following takes you through from basic to Advanced setups of Examine. Should be pretty straight forward:

http://farmcode.org/post/2009/04/20/Umbraco-Examine-v4x-Powerful-Umbraco-Indexing.aspx

Here's a quick example (in-page):

SearchResults.ascx.cs

string keyWords = "";
if (Request.QueryString["k"] != null)
{
    keyWords = Request.QueryString["k"].ToString();
}
var sb = new StringBuilder();

// perform the search...
var examine = new UmbracoIndexer();
List<SearchResult> results = examine.Search(keyWords, true);

sb.Append("<p class=\"notification\">Your search for <span class=\"words\">" + keyWords + "</span> yielded <span class=\"numItms\">" + results.Count + "</span> items.</p>");
sb.Append("<ul class=\"search-results\">");
foreach (SearchResult sr in results)
{
    sb.Append("<li>");
        sb.Append("<a href=\"" + url + "\" target=\""+target+"\">");
            sb.Append(sr.Fields["nodeName"]);
        sb.Append("</a> ");
        sb.Append("<div class=\"desc\">");
            var descStr=sr.Fields["bodyText"];
            if (descStr.Length > 250)
            {
                sb.Append(descStr.Substring(0, 250));
                sb.Append("...");
            }
            else
            {
                sb.Append(descStr);
            }
        sb.Append("</div>");
    sb.Append("</li>");
}
sb.Append("</ul>");

_resultsContainer.Text = sb.ToString();

SearchResults.aspx

<asp:Literal id="_resultsContainer" runat="server"></asp:Literal>

Of course, you can also do this using DataTables or something for sorting, paging, etc. This is just a quick/dirty example. 

-- Nik

Thanks Nik.

Your example was very helpful (at least to me) :-)

Cheers
Morten

is working on a reply...