Dan -- I took a glance. Sounds promising. Could you talk a bit about the use case you at anticipating? What are you indexing? How fast is it changing? Do the shards fit in memory? What's a ballpark for the searches per second you'd like to handle?
My first thought is that you may be able to trade off some latency for increased throughput by sticking with partially serialized requests if you were able to pass a threshold score along to each node/shard so you could speed past low scoring results. But this brings up Marvin's points about how to handle distributed TF/IDF... --nate
