Don't use Plucene for real work
Just in case anyone's using Plucene as a search engine, please don't. It's terribly slow. Take a look at KinoSearch instead. Plucene is written in pure Perl, mostly as a proof of concept. It is literally orders of magnitude slower than KinoSearch, which uses C for the hard bits. Here's a page of benchmarks to make the point.
it's hardly an unbiased source...
So what?
Unless you need Unicode support, SWISH-E is a great choice for full-text searching in Perl. It comes with all of the indexing tools you're likely to need and has an easy Perl API. It's a very quick way to get an extremely fast text search up and running.