I have a project to create a high traffic search engine similar to altavista.com. The windows .NET C# will be used for the project. I am looking for a good search engine database that can handle a very high load. I have taken a look at lucene and sql server 2008. I have read that lucene tends to get corrupt when the load is very high. So, I am considering sql server 2008 but I am uncertain sql server can handle a very high load over gigabytes of data.
The database will be given a chunk of data and needs to fetch similar data elsewhere in the table. it will act just the similar questions area on stackoverflow. It will need to search over millions of rows. Is sql server 2008 and lucene my only options