[rb2k_]

I don't really know what the "managed through Drupal nodes" means in this context. For a simple drupal fulltext search I can recommend apache solr ( http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr ).

For regular crawling:

I found anemone ( http://anemone.rubyforge.org/ ) to be a lovely framework for single page crawls.

Other interesting candidates:

https://github.com/hasmanydevelopers/RDaneel

http://www.redaelli.org/matteo-blog/projects/ebot/

http://nutch.apache.org/ (meh, java)