Quoting KatolaZ (katolaz@???):

> I totally agree on your point, Steve. And even without taking into
> account the design choices, the main issue is that the interface is
> pretty *slow* and much heavier than lurker... I guess fixing Lurker
> is a far better option ;)

Enzo, do I guess correctly that Mailman 2.x / pipermail with add-on
search software was considered and deemed not good enough? My
suspicion is 'yes' and that there's good reason to so think.

Long decades ago, there was a brief vogue for such search software to
add to Web sites. I remember that Webglimpse and HtDig were popular
circa 2002. Here's a list of such things from an academic paper about
them:

ASPSeek, BBDBot, Dat- apark, ebhath, Eureka, ht://Dig, Indri, ISearch,
IXE, Lucene, Managing Gigabytes (MG), MG4J, mnoGoSearch, MPS
Information Server, Namazu, Nutch, Omega, OmniFind IBM Yahoo! Ed.,
OpenFTS, PLWeb, SWISH-E, SWISH++, Terrier, WAIS/ freeWAIS,
WebGlimpse, XML Query Engine, XMLSearch, Zebra, and Zettair.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f751/546cd86faefa2c7a4642166643df4c7cc6af.pdf

I literally never got around to trying running even one of them, ever,
and they seem to be severely out of fashion.

I suspect that trying even a best-of-breed offering would show
frustrating limits resulting from the serach facility treating mailing
list archives as just a mass of text without taking into account their
structure.