Best way to code a search engine (across my database)?

[eluser]Aquillyne[/eluser]
[quote author="Bramme" date="1216429375"]2) you could run an ereg_replace on all your non standard letters, like é à etc. and replace them with e and a.[/quote]

Problem is, the fields in the database are stored with those letters. I might have, for instance, NAME: "Fooé di Barèbaz". How can I run a query that'll return that result without the query actually involving those special characters?