introduction with a Search Enghine for Text

SEFT is short for a Search Engine For Text, if you just want to search text, and don't want a full-blown indecer, you can take a look at seft, it offers the ranked queries and similarity matching of a genuine information retrival system, compared with the two main classes :large-scale systems that make use of an inverted index or some other auxiliary data structure which intended for massive volumes of data; and the small-scale systems based upon sequential pattern matching that most computer users employ when hunting for missing email and news items.it does so withoout any need for an index to be precomputed. it determines word locations within the files that are of interest with respect to the query, now a graphical version of seft, which entiled xseft, is available for download, it requires GTK v1.2(a toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces) to be installed on your system.
the paper "Needles and Haystacks: A Search Engine for Personal Information Collections"，presents a discussion of seft.