Obsfucated and Pretty or Accessible and Bland?

Today I've had the dubious pleasure of using two totally different "search engines". While both do more or less a similar job, each has it's own strengths and weaknesses. htdig is an opensource search engine which has been around for a while, and while it has lots of options to customise it, it's easy to mess things up. The other piece of software I was looking at was the Microsoft Indexing service. It's got a nice enough interface for the configuration, and it performs quickly, however it seems to be extraordinarily difficult to access it via a web frontend. It seems rather heavily oriented to local file systems rather than for use with web applications, and trying to glean the web for information didn't return anything useful. Ah well, maybe it's just that it will take a long time for it to become used in this way and for people to document examples etc.