I have recently started exploring verity search, so I just thought I'd share my experiences and views.
So to start, getting the thing working in the first place was a pain! After much googling I find that verity doesn't run on a Mac. Not hugely problematic since I have Windows XP installed in parallel with Mac OS. I could simply tap into the verity server on my Windows OS. It would mean running Windows everytime I needed it, which tends to slow my laptop when I'm going at full steam, but needs must.
However, while I indeed had verity installed on Windows, the version that comes in-built with ColdFusion doesn't allow remote connection (due to licensing restrictions). And to make things worse, it seems Verity is no longer a supported product, and is currently being redeveloped by another company. Still, considering the huge price for the software, this was never a viable option.
I played around with Lucene, an open-source project provided by Apache. This was simple to install and indexed files much faster than verity, and while it isn't directly accessible through ColdFusion, Ray Camden has built a great wrapper for it.
Whilst this worked, it had drawbacks. Firstly, Lucene doesn't return a context like verity, so keyword highlighting is out of the question. Then there's the CustomTags. Since there is no way to make the built-in ColdFusion tags run on a different engine, you have to use customTags; which is fine, if your going to use it in production. When my site goes live it will need to use verity, as Lucene is not installed on my production server.
So while Lucene and Seeker got me going with searching, I still needed to tap into verity, and I CRAVED for those contexts! I finally gave in and decided to do any verity-based work on my virtual machine.
And whilst doing so, I've noticed a little glitch with it. This could not be an issue to anyone else - but when I tap refresh multiple times in my browser whilst on the search results page, I get duplicate entries being returned. I'd love to know if anyone else can see this, otherwise I'll need to start debugging.
As an overall opinion, I love being able to search documents with ColdFusion, but the search engine is far too outdated, far too slow, and lacking in functionality (for example, it doesn't render CF variables when its indexing, which means variable names are returned). It would be great to see CF9 dump verity and get a spanking new engine. This whole searching websites could have great potential ;)