Searching for search

I was recently contacted by MondoSoft. They make a search engine that 
looks pretty good and I am evaluating it. I am interested in hearing 
about other search engines that you have used to index your sites. 
There are many -- goto, excite, altavista -- and I don't know how 
they work, how they charge, etc.

What we really need is an engine with a good user interface that 
indexes our whole site, including, if possible, text search inside 
PDFs.

My servers are Unix (Solaris) and NT; web server is Apache.

I have Cold Fusion which includes Verity search but its extent is 
apparently limited to what's in the database.

I'll summarize responses so you can reply in private or public as you wish.

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