I work at Basho. Specifically I've been doing a lot of work on Riak Search lately. I absolutely agree that the Search documentation is underwhelming and could use some major love. I take it as a personal challenge to improve the situation before the 1.0 release comes out.
That aside, you might like to know that for the 1.0 release Search is bundled along with the standard Riak package (you just need to set a flag to enable it). You can try using the latest pre-release or even build from source on master or the 1.0 branch. If you don't actually need full-text search then you could also checkout Riak's new support for secondary indexes. Please drop a line on the mailing list or IRC if you have questions.
That aside, you might like to know that for the 1.0 release Search is bundled along with the standard Riak package (you just need to set a flag to enable it). You can try using the latest pre-release or even build from source on master or the 1.0 branch. If you don't actually need full-text search then you could also checkout Riak's new support for secondary indexes. Please drop a line on the mailing list or IRC if you have questions.