Searching for text in files of different formats

[David C Sterratt <david c sterratt ed ac uk>]

Apologies if this is the wrong list to sent this request to, but I
think it does classify best as a GNOME Desktop Development issue --
please let me know if there is a better forum.  

One thing is really missing from the gnome 2.0 desktop is the ability
to search for text in files of different formats, i.e, not just text
files, but also word, openoffice docs &c.  I've recently migrated my
wife from windows to RH8.0, and this is a feature she misses sorely.

Actually "misses" should be in the past tense, because I made a
trivial patch to version 2.1.90 of gsearchtool so that it calls a
script which I've called anygrep.  Anygrep does the job of grep in
gsearchtool, but uses filters for word files, openoffice files &c
before running grep.  This works, but is rather slow, even on a 1.8GHz
athlon.  My wife is now happy.

I'm moderately happy, but not very satisfied, as this is an
inefficient hack, to put it mildly.

I realise that medusa should in the future do the job of my script,
but not much seems to have been happening on medusa recently.  I can
envisage putting together a more efficient hack that would be useful
in the interim.  It would involve an indexing program such as htdig or
namazu to speed things up, indexing via a cron job, and cheking any
files that were newer than the index.

So I suppose I've two questions.  Firstly, is it likely that medusa
will make a milestone in the near future?  And secondly, if not, would
it be worth trying to use an existing indexer to fulfil the
functionality in the interim?  

Best wishes,

David