There's no real advantage (and several disadvantages) to my shifting from AskSam---any of the information is easily exportable in ASCII format, and if I dropped AskSam I'd be leaving a fast, very flexible full-text search engine for...??

By my suggestions for the input source and method which could have course be impossible but I said waht I thought would be the ideal.

An industry standard SQL database
A system that could reflect corrections and additions viewable by Mudcat as and when made.
A system that could again easitly be exported to ASCII amongst other things.
A system that would allow you a team of contributers if you desired.
A syastem that should be able to perform all of your search requirements.
Freedom from some degree of tie to proprietary software.

Have a play with my play here sure it wont do the boolean searches (except AND is implied on a keyword seach and OR is allowed on keywords (without the @)) in some way.

Bear in mind that was little no more than a single afternoon's hack wich had a further couple of 10 minute hacks added as a result of comments from Joe. It's only a play but I really don't think it would be too difficult for anyone to provide all the features you suggest on with free open source industry standard tools.

At least that's the way I see it. Thanks for the discussion btw.