Doug Cutting once said, back in 2003: " The *HitCollector*-based search API is not meant to work remotely. To do so would involve an RPC-callback for every non-zero score, which would be extremely expensive. Also, just making *HitCollector* serializable would not be sufficient. You'd also need to pass in a *HitCollector* implementation that subclasses UnicastRemoteObject, so that the callbacks can return to the original VM.
So, if you can, it's considerably simpler and more efficient to use TopDocs-based search when you're working remotely." Is this still considered best practice? - jeff r.
