Search with Pagination

[eluser]ridley1012[/eluser]
Hi everyone, I'm pretty new to CodeIgniter, enjoying learning it but I'm actually trying to develop a website for a client which seemed the perfect opportunity to start learning the framework.

The problem I've come across is I'm struggling to implement a search option along with pagination at the same time. I have the pagination working when retrieving all rows from a table on the database but would like to allow the website users to click a button to limit the type of records retrieved. you may be able to see what I mean better by looking at the page I'm creating Northstone Gallery - Artist list

I've tried adjusting the segments to allow search strings but can't seem to get my head around the pagination working with the search segments. Hoping someone may be able to point me to a tutorial/previous post detailing how this is done, i've also read a few post which states its best to use a processing page to return a hash which then displays the results. Would this be the best way forward; if so would anyone have a good tutorial to follow. thanks in advance for any help.