@Daethian well, i cant say im familiar with this TNG7 thing at all, maybe its cause im such a star trek gook, but as soon as i look at it i see ’‘star trek the next generation 7 seasons’’ joke
well, the reason i mentioned javascript at all is because it would be possible to create a search engine with it. a large collection of: if search field = x goto http. but with 17.000 entries this would be out of the question.
what you will need, if this TNG7 does not work out for you is some php and mySQL, you will need to create a database for all the files and wire it all up with php.
there is one more option that could possibly work for you. if all the data is made in to html so it can be found by google, and you make a detailed enough site map, you could look at embeding a google custom search engine on to your site and set it to search your site internally.
anyway, good luck with that, if you have any troubles just drop me a line in PM or something.