Ask HN: What do REAL programmers use for full-text searching?

What's the best solution for someone writing a large/small scale application to use for text-searching. At the moment, I'm using SQLite and PHP in a CGI environment.

The problem is that this creates some interesting tasks to solve. I can cache search results, but thats against what I want (no cache, but still fast).

The problem comes down to pagination for me; I want to support an admin searching 1000 users for the string "duck" and coming up with "dicktracy1023" and "DucksRock"

Right now I'm using PHP's String Distance but it runs through my full database in order to. is there a better way?