Does anyone have any experience or information with changes to
search results or the topic pages?

I'm sure there is a way to do what I'm looking for but I'm not sure
of the difficuly just yet. I've heard that changing any part of the
search requires getting into the DLL code, which wouldn't be fun.

I'm working primarily with documents and document management. I
have a SPS set up with multiple top-level WSS sites. Each of the
WSS sites has a document library with similar settings and meta data
and are publishing to a 'common' topic hierarchy at the portal
level.

In both the portal and WSS searches, I'd like to display
different/additional information in the search results - to include
meta data fields. (things like category, brief description, etc...)

I'd like to do a similar thing in the topics area. In addition to
the document name appearing, I'd like to be able to display
additional meta data information.