Implementing site-wide search (like Yii website)

Hi,

I need to implement site-wide search like Yii website has.

The most imporant for me is how to retrieve data from multiple sources (tables) - in my case subpages, newses, photo descriptions etc? Simple SQL "LIKE" or "REGEXP" would be enough as for me, but I need to have "sort by date" feature so retrieving all the matching records than sorting them in PHP array is not ther best way to go.

Of course it’d be cool to have text highlighting like Yii has but it’s far less imporant.

Hope to hear a word from Dev Team, how Yii-website search is built? Does it use Sphinx or any other search engine?