On the Design Aeon blog there's a new post sharing a CakePHP component that can be used to easily add searching to your framework-based application.

Cake Php Search Component is used to implement search in your cake php projects.The component provide highly reusability. component is meant to use across all the controllers. you just include this search component in your Controller and call a component function to fetch your conditions types in search form and refine the data .

The component (available for download here) is simple to install and full instructions for implementing it are included in the post - including it in the controller, creating search and pagination elements, making a controller action and finally making a view to tie it all together.