[Zope] 3rd Party Search Engine

[Eric]

Hi,
I'm in the process of integrating a 3rd party search engine with Zope and have 
a question about being able to make this work. I'd like to use the spidering 
capability of this search engine for it to build it's own index.

What should the most ideal approach be?

1) Should I write an object in Zope that will interface between the 
search engine and the objects in Zope? 
For example, writing an object that uses a script that the search engine could 
call to Plone to return a list of objects of type 'documents' that were 
modified in a given range of time. 

2) Should I write an object in Zope that will make calls to the Zcatalog 
to get back simliar results in 1)?
I'm concerned about having to manage both the ZCatalog and the 3rd-party search 
engine's catalog. There may also be performance issues to consider.