This article deals with one such alternative, SWISH-E aka the Simple Web Indexing System for Humans - Enhanced. As the name suggests, SWISH-E is particularly good at indexing Web content, be it in text, HTML, XML, PDF or DOC format. If you're trying to add a full-text search engine to your Web site, but don't really want to spend too much time on configuration and data processing, this might just be the thing you're looking for.

He looks at some of the basics of SWISH-E, how to get it all installed (as a PECL module) and some of the other libraries it'll need to get working. He shows how to create a sample index and search on the command line and how to spider a site to gather the information it needs to index.