I was a Historical Theology Student and had thousands of plain text files which I personally used for research. GREP was my best friend.<p>I think this would have kicked into over drive, but I need Latin, Greek, German, Danish support for the searches which unicode would be perfect but these plain text files were written in ascii. To bad I am not in the field anymore nor a System's Librarian. Would have sunk a lot of time into this.
This looks like a fun self-educational attempt, but not something to compete with Lucene-based search-engines. Which the OP actually hints at (project to distract myself, not as powerful as Lucene).<p>What would be cool is to read about the lessons-learned in building this, as that would be useful whether or not people actually want to install Strus.
The search demo on Wikipedia (<a href="http://demo.project-strus.net/strus.html" rel="nofollow">http://demo.project-strus.net/strus.html</a>) seems broken? Exciting to see pragmatic/simple('ish) approach to full-text searching!