Bryan, you do not need to "change search" in production and risk your site's availability while it's indexing.

This has to be tested in the non-prod environment first. Make a copy of your site with all files (can skip copying the thumbnail images - just regenerate them after), and test how it goes with indexing. Only after ironing out the details you might plan to do a roll-over of the new search into the production server. May be do a staged approach, like import the already generated index from the test into prod, to avoid long time to reindex again...

Anyhow this sounds like a big fun project!