A new article at phpriot walks through using the Zend_Search_Lucene which is part of the new Zend Framework. I’ve been playing with Xapian recently and liking it a lot, but Lucene is next on my list. There’s a scholarly comparison sheet (PDF) which compares several open source IR engines, which suggests the information retrieval performance is between Xapian and Lucene is broadly similar. However, it will be interesting to benchmark the two to see what differences in speed there may be.