Hi,
just to point out that Lucene is the de-facto standard, being tremendously succesfull and likely the most tested searching engine available, being chosen quite often for good reasons.
Also Hibernate Search is not an alternative/competitor to Lucene, as it uses Lucene as fulltext engine. The purpose of using Hibernate Search is to provide sensible helpers to simpllify the index management and integration with databases through Hibernate, it eases mapping from object oriented entities to the index.
About numeric range queries, yes they are supported, initially in a quite problematic way but since the latest Lucene version 3.0 there's a highly optimized implementation; this is also available in the backport in Lucene 2.9.x, which is the currently used version by Hibernate Search (but the next version coming out soon will target 3.0).
So yes, they are not a problem, provided you understand how to implement them:
http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/SearchNumericalFields