Text retrieval is a helpful tool in many applications, including software engineering and portfolio managing. An overview of text indexing and retrieval tools available up to 1996 was done while I was a summer intern at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ. More recently, I tried to implement a text retrieval system based on Python (of which I am a big fan and which I tried to learn in this fashion). Unfortunately, the attempt resulted in little more than a nicer interface to a YACC/LEX-like parser written in Python by Aaron Watters.