bearisgray, first I want to switch the board and iron out all bugs and any critical issues that affect the core functionality.
Once it's running smoothly, I can start adding features.
As for the search, right now I'm not sure if I'm going to continue using this engine or get a new one.
What we have now is run with Apache Lucene. If you are interested in specifics of ranking, you can find more information here:
http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/