Can I use WDS as the search engine to find documents in a web application?

Scenario:
- I have a website calledhttp://www.myportal.com/running on Windows Server 2003 SP1.
- I have hundreds of documents stored in thehttp://www.myportal.com/documents/ directory.
- I want to create the web pagesearch.aspx that calls WDS to search the documents directory.

Questions:
1) Is this possible anyway? I know WDS can't run as a service, and that it will only run/index when a user is logged in. Any workaround for it to run using the NETWORK SERVICE account, so that ASP.NET would have access to the indexes it builds?

2) Or is there a better way to do this? I've looked at Indexing Service and Microsoft Search Service, but I don't know if those technologies apply.
Thanks!