I am at Drupal Conference attending the Acquia Apache Solr presentation. This integration has a lot of promise in my opinion.  The drupal search is not that useful, we’ve actually replaced drupal search on our implementations with google custom search.

Apache Solr is an open source project:

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat.

Apache Solr has a lot of promise improving the search results which, considering the down sides of drupal search, would greatly improve the user experience.

Acquia has the Apache Solr search service in beta right now and it will be offered as a hosted offering.

We saw a preview of the www.drupal.org site redesign and it definitely looks like they will be using the Apache Solr.   The demo of the search results page looked very promising, with features such as search suggest, filter and more features to come.