Simon, the search package and openfts are intertwined,  but openfts is an independent project that, in addition to openacs, has support for perl, tclsh, and stand-alone aolserver applications.  Currently there are no maintainers for the search and openfts-driver packages, so search integration with openacs is suffering somewhat.

I will try and get a new version of openfts released by the end of next week.