*implementing* search engines for a campus

[JQ Johnson]

The various threads discussing search engines on this list have focused
mostly on the public web-wide search tools.  I'd like to pursue a
slightly different thread:  what has your experience been implementing 
local search engines/indices for web pages on your campus?

Many sites have such indices, often implemented using wais, glimpse, or
swish if the server platform happens to be Unix.  In our case we have a
distributed "site" with a growing number of servers, and it would be
very desirable to have easy to manage tools to provide indices of web
pages that spanned several web servers.  Since the size of the database
if comparatively small ( < 100K pages), ease of use probably dominates
expressive power in searches.  Since we spend less money
accomplishing things than some other sites (cf another thread on this
list) we're particularly interested in freeware.  That suggests using
harvest (or perhaps lycos?), but our experience with harvest has been
that it is a rather complex system to set up and administer.

Any experience to report from the community of web managers who read 
this list?