1. A method for building a metadata index for unstructured data, the method comprising: receiving streaming unstructured data into a reconfigurable logic device, the streaming unstructured data comprising data for a plurality of files, the reconfigurable logic device having a plurality of pipelined firmware application modules deployed thereon; the pipelined firmware application modules analyzing the streaming unstructured data to generate metadata about the streaming unstructured data at hardware processing speeds, the analyzing including detecting whether a term is found in any of the files, the generated metadata comprising data associated with the files that is indicative of where a file having the detected term can be located; and generating an index about the streaming unstructured data from the generated metadata, the index for subsequent querying to locate files of interest based on associations between the metadata and the files.