Implementing a simple search engine, this is what I've done so far:

• In collection.xconf, added this section, to enable fulltext searching of the specified nodes:

      <lucene>
        <text qname="tei:entry"></text>
        <text qname="tei:pron"></text>
        <text qname="tei:def"></text>
        <text qname="tei:hyph"></text>
        <text qname="tei:note"></text>
      </lucene>
  

• Confirmed that simple queries like this now work:

  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  declare namespace tei="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  declare namespace ft="http://exist-db.org/xquery/lucene";
  
  for $e in collection('/db/moses')//tei:entry[ft:query(., 'visiting')]
        return $e
  

• Added a pipeline for outputting the XML results of the search, and confirmed the results are showing up with appropriate exist:match tags.
• Created a basic pipeline for the eventual XHTML output.

Next steps:

• Create a search.xsl file, which will render a search form.
• Decide whether we should retrieve results into the existing page, or whether we should reload the page anew and echo out the search parameters.
• Decide on how to render the results (full items, I think).
• Test the Lucene query syntax, and evaluate it against the flexibility of our own Java library. We could rewrite the Java library to support the Lucence ft: searching, or if it provides enough power on its own, adopt it in preference to ours.