I've used swish-e, and taken advantage of the available Perl library 
interface for some work. IMHO, swish-e is fast, and very extensible (I 
followed the examples and wrote an interface to a db). Great work guys.

I also notice that the last release is some 2 years back - 17 Dec 2004 
to be exact. I think we need to swish-e to remain relevant, and maybe 
take advantage new technologies/ platforms. No need to compete with the 
likes of Lucene and Kinosearch, but I think just moving forward and 
staying relavant is good enough for most of us.

To the maintainers/ developers of swish-e: any hints of when the next 
release will be out?

Hope this helps.