How do I build a search mechanism for my application?

Question

It seems to be a common requirement nowadays to have a search feature that can search almost anything you want. Can anyone give me samples or tips as to how to go about building a one stop search for an application?

For example: you have 3 tables customers, products, employees. The application has a master page that has a textbox at the right hand corner very similar to what you have on stackoverflow.

How do I have a search say for term say "Phoenix" and have results like

Customers

Result 1
......

Products

Result 1
......

Employees

Result 1
......

Any tips, tutorials and hints would be really appreciated. My environment is Win2k3,.net3.5,C#,ASP.net.

EDIT: Looking specifically at performance and scalability.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Lucene.NET is an extremely fast full text search engine.

Sample usage:

See Source code of DotNetKicks starting from codebehind of search page