If you decide to roll your own the Lingua::Stem module is pretty darned useful. It implements a common stemming algorithm so that searches for 'search' will find 'searching', 'searched', 'searchable', etc., without resorting to LIKE queries. (This is probably done internally by most full-text search database plugins, but it can be useful to manipulate yourself if you want to do anything nonstandard.

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode