Drupal custom search form for a specific content type

Question

I have created a Car content type with taxonomy vocabularies and CCK fields to describe make, model, year, price, color, ect. My site will contain very little content aside from cars, and I want to implement a search form similar to the one found on http://openautoclassifieds.com/search.php. The select boxes allow users to choose from valid options instead of entering text themselves and risking not finding anything. Is there a module that allows me to do this?

I am not opposed to coding something up myself, but have never interacted with the Drupal search backend. Assuming I could create the search form that would populate the fields with the correct values from the database, is there a good function I can just pass this info to to return search results, or will I need to make my own SQL query, format the results myself, ect?

Answer 1

You could a couple different things here.

You could create a View that shows your Car Content Type and then expose various fields to the user as filters for search. Here's an example: http://www.cae-nyc.org/schools - it happens to be mashed up with a Google Map - but the search fields on the left are Views filters.

Or

Take a look at the Faceted Search Module - http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search