Hi Toby, Great post! I actually do understand why many companies claim a search can take minutes to render a result because we're working with a few clients where this is the case. In the situations I've seen, the reason for such poor performance is due to the fact that the documents being indexed are stored in one location and the metadata that describes them are in another. When the query is executed, the search engined does a real time lookup to find the matching metadata. I've also seen this occur when the search engine has to do a real time lookup on security. All search engines today store both metadata and security information in the index. The customer might be "blown away" by the performance improvment, but any search engine would have done the same. Cheers Martin from BA-Insight (www.ba-insight.net)