Most of high traffic or complex Drupal sites use Apache Solr as the search engine. It is much faster and more scaleable than Drupal's search module.
In a previous article on Drupal with Apache Solr 4.x, we described one way to install the latest stable Apache Solr 4.x. That article detailed a lot of manual steps involving downloading, extracting, setting permissions, creating a startup script, ...etc.

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