[vhodges]

Well... HN for one or Reddit, r/programming and r/webdev would probably be logical places to ask/discuss such things.

As for web search, something like solr/elastic search or even just Postgres eg http://rachbelaid.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enou...

I used Postgres full text search (from Rails) and it was simple and easy to get going but never got beyond pilot stage so can't comment on longer term short comings/scaling issues that might exist for it.