Search across multiple sources

I don't think there's an easy way to do this but I thought I better ask just in case. I'm trying to come up with a way to search across a number of databases without resorting to lots of horrible scripts. In one database I have a lot of news stories from our news provider while in another database I have a lot of user entered content. Ideally I'd like to search across both databases via a single web-based search form.

The obvious way is to create a tsearch index/table in both databases and then to connect to each one in turn and to merge the results together but that doesn't seem like the best solution and potentially there could be issues with ranking and so on.

Is it possible to create a single search database which can store search data from a number of different databases. This is all on the same server of course.

Another option I looked at was to use an external search tool lke mnogosearch (http://www.mnogosearch.ru/doc/msearch-extended-indexing.html#htdb) although since I've used tsearch elsewhere it would be nice to use it here as well.

Cheers,
Graeme