Hi all,

I'm looking into the options we have for replacing our current search setup where we use Index Server to index documents from a webserver and then we have SQL that queries both database content and document content to present one set of combined search results to our applications.

I've installed Search Server 2010 to evaluate whether we can put the results out via SQL, but it looks like it's overkill for what we need, and I'm not sure about MS plans to continue this as a standalone search option.

It seems like there should be a MS solution to allow the indexing and querying of document content via SQL that isn't Index Server or a full SharePoint implementation.  If not does anyone have any non-MS solutions they recommend (Lucene, etc)?

Any suggestions or references would be of great assistance.

Many thanks.

A google physical's appliance ?

else you could get your hand on any webcrawler to get the site indexed & you query over that database. 

Honnestly I suggest a sharepoint, as you can map userdrive to a sharepoint folder, and such control. So it's a good place to hold a lot of documents in the end (with all your AD's control)

Thanks Philippe,

We need to apply our own quite complex security rules onto the search results and the documents (PDFs, etc) aren't publicly visible so can't be crawled by a standard site-crawl.

Are people using Search Server 2010 to perform document searching?  I tried to find some reference about how to pull out crawl results from it in SQL, but couldn't find any obvious resources on this issue.