I SAID DON'T ASK! But okay, fine. It's actually exactly the story you'd probably guess: the Knowledge Base that I work for has actually been around for a long time. It used to be just text files on a common machine, and then it was served over Gopher. So when someone first wrote a search engine for it, off-the-shelf solutions weren't really available. And we've just been porting it forward ever since.

We'll replace it someday, but first we have to make sure our mission critical machines aren't going to die tomorrow....