we wrote and still maintain a large E-Commerce application. Our feature list resembles what you would expect from most shops. We'd like to improve some of our features, and now the search/suggestion list functionality (enter some letters, a JScripted suggestion list appears) has caught our eye.

Currently, we use http://xapian.org/. It has some drawbacks. Firstly, it's not actually the right solution. It has been created to index documents, not ever-changing data in a granularity that an E-Commerce application would need. Secondly, the load on the database is significant when we reindex all data every night.

We'd like a framework that has been designed for indexing database data, which can add to the index easily and without much load, which can supply data changes in the backoffice quickly to the frontend without much load and delay.

I'm aware of the fact that Xapian is Open Source and even Free Software, so we could adapt it to our needs if we decided to invest the time and manpower. But taking a quick look around for a solution more suited seems fair, right?

Oh, and commercial applications are fine, too. FOSS is not required.

Thanks a bunch.