About a month ago we purchased a license for XepientSolution's Open-SearchEngine v2.0. Open-SearchEngine is a DNN aware search engine that indexes content by crawling rather then indexing the DNN DB content directly. On the cover this appeared to be a good module and performed well in a our test environment (a single server, dual core, 4GB server). Yesterday, we moved from test to production - a web farm environment - and the search engine fell apart. Two main problems were experienced:

1. The search engine, its settings modules and its results modules all cause object exception problems if a server is specified for the "Run on servers" attribute under the the DNN schedule associated with the search engine. This is necessary in a web farm environment as it is not recommnded to run a seach engine indexer on multiple servers. After digging around in the source code it looked like web farm support had not been properly addressed for the search engine.

2. The search engine does not limit its crawl scope to a specified URL if the URL includes a sub-site or virtual directory. For example, my site is configured for the URL http://[domain]/[virtual dir]. The site also includes links to http://[domain]. The search engine will index both urls (fully). IMHO this is incorrect. The scope should be limited to links beginning with my URL. This problem also occurs if a page contains a link to a peer site such as http://[domain]/[peer virtual dir].

Has anyone had similiar experiences or found resolutions to these problems? We have reverted to the default DNN search engine, which although produces results does not meet our specific requirements (e.g. PDF indexing).

Can anyone suggest a good alternative (commerical is fine)? Our main requirements are search scope management and PDF indexing (not a big list).