As mentioned previously, searching currently uses SQL. In future versions, it is likely that Platform and Solution searches will begin to use the Generic Search Server as the searching method of choice. However, it is likely that SQL searching will also continue to be supported as-is currently, both from an upgrade protection perspective, and from a fallback/failover option perspective in case of network or other deployment problems.
To facilitate this, a Search Router factory class should be implemented which should returns a reference to either the database search implementation or the Generic Search Server based implementation based on a property setting.