The best way to search a site using PHP/MySQL?

Question

I'm in need of implementing a solid site search solution to our framework. It has to search all pages and data.

I could make my own using MySQL, though after reading some blogs I realize there are a lot of things to take into consideration. Plus; I rather not re-invent the wheel.

About a year ago, I've worked with Zend_Search_Lucene. Loved the way of building indexes and then searching them later when needed. Though I found Zend_Search_Lucene sometimes gave inacurate results, so I don't really trust it anymore.

Requirements

• backend solution only (I want to output results myself)
• results have to be (as good as) live (max a few hours delay)
• results have to be complete
• results have to be sorted by relevance
• should not require any installation on server (I use clustered hosting on which I can't install anything)
• no advertisements

Do you know of a solution that is solid, trustworthy and meets these demands?

UPDATE 1*

This searching solution will not need to handle a high amount of traffic for now. It is acceptable that when a solution is required to handle high amounts of traffic and data, we'll get another server on which we can install a good solution.

Answer 1

Actually, I used to use a simple implementation of a search system. Many moons ago this was the best way to go for a 'no server installation' method.

http://www.sphider.eu/

Let us know how you get on. You do need a database, but presumably you have a clustered database which you could offload the data onto. If your solution isn't MySQL based, then this would require a lot of work, but for simple and straight forward crawling and searching it's definitely the way forward.

There is also a very easy to run cron-job script built in (if memory serves me well).