There are two interfaces for the search engine -- the public search interface, which your visitors see, and the private admin area, which only you will see.
Public Search Interface
Try out a simple search of the xav.com web site:
The public interface can be customized quite a bit. All of the HTML is template-based and can be easily changed to match your site's layout.
In addition, there are tons of different search options that you can enable for your visitors, like result sorting, keyword highlighting, synonym matching, and context matching (see the "Advanced Searching" section of Help for more info).
You may want to review FDSE customer sites to see how others have customized FDSE and integrated it with their site layout.
Web-Based Admin Interface
The admin interface is a secure area where you can define sets of documents to be searched (known as "realms"). You can then build the indexes for those realms, and also rebuild the indexes when the content changes.
We maintain several FDSE installs in various languages. You may log into their admin area using password "password". Most features are fully enabled, though a few are not.
Note that all languages are included in FDSE, and you can switch between languages on the fly from the web-based admin interface. The languages are only installed separately in the demo to keep things organized.
Language ISO Quality Demonstration English en 100% Search Page Admin Page العربية / Arabic ar 99% Search Page Admin Page Danish dk 99% Search Page Admin Page Dutch nl 99% Search Page Admin Page Finnish fi 13% Search Page Admin Page Français / French fr 99% Search Page Admin Page Deutsch / German de 99% Search Page Admin Page Italiano / Italian it 96% Search Page Admin Page Latviski / Latvian lv 42% Search Page Admin Page Norsk-bokmål / Norwegian nb 99% Search Page Admin Page Português / Portuguese pt 97% Search Page Admin Page Romanian ro 88% Search Page Admin Page Slovenski / Slovenian sl 88% Search Page Admin Page Spanish / Español es 92% Search Page Admin Page Srpski / Serbian sr 44% Search Page Admin Page Svenska / Swedish sv 89% Search Page Admin Page Tagalog tl 92% Search Page Admin Page Türkçe / Turkish tr 90% Search Page Admin Page Русский / Russian ru 59% Search Page Admin Page 笅伄䷟攢 / Chinese cn 43% Search Page Admin Page Bosanski / Bosnian bs 41% Search Page Admin Page Polski / Polish pl 27% Search Page Admin Page Lietuvi¡kai / Lithuanian pl 58% Search Page Admin Page
Command-Line Admin Interface
Many FDSE admin tasks can also be completed from the command line. While there aren't demos of this, there are some help files which discuss it in more detail:
FDSE Help: How to Use FDSE from the Command Line
FDSE Help: How to automatically rebuild the index
FDSE Help: How to Use FDSE as a Perl API