How to perform advanced searches on db

[eluser]zimco[/eluser]
There's actually been alot of discussion about writing search engines and implementing in CI, but it can be hard to find the threads(i searched the forums using keywords "search engines" and lucene). Anyhow here's one i found you might find useful http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/92164/

From reading various CI threads about search engines it seems alot of developers just like to drop a third-party search engine in their apps and let it do all the heavy lifting like:
lucene - http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend...ucene.html
sphinx - http://sphinxsearch.com/

However, i found that's not as easy as it sounds if you are not familiar with the third-party engines and the learning curve is pretty steep; it scared me off from them

If you want something really simple like you described: one form, with one input field, that does a fulltext search via something like mysql's fulltext index on a column in a myisam database, that's really not too hard to implement in CI.

It really depends on what you need your search engine to be able to do.