The search_observer_queue query gets an event_date column, so this is the name that we need to pass to the dequeue function as well (it was 'date'). This doesn't fix the bigger problem that the search_observer_dequeue query doesn't get picked up by the query processor, however
the package is 99% ported to oracle. the only file that still requires alittle porting is www/search.tclnow all someone needs to do is write the FtsEngineDriver for Oracle. i didn'tdo it since i didn't need site-wide-search quite yet.