Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone on this list. Just by my lurking you guys have helped me solve problems I didn't even know I had.
As a Drupal enthusiast fighting through the learning curve (and loving every second of it) I do occasionally hit a wall, and this is one of those times. After trying a half dozen modules and pouring through literally hundreds of drupal.org nodes, I am no closer than when I started.
I have a content type with a slew of fields and some 30K nodes.
I would like to make this searchable by field -- Last Name, First Name, DOB, DOD, etc. -- with a themed search form to match. You know, "search by last name", "search by first name", and so on. Faceted search, while a nice idea, isn't necessary.
I've tried exposing Views filters without much luck (although if this is the way to go, I'm happy to revisit Views, hopefully armed with a handbook page or something) and tried the Search API ( I can't get it to index anything). Finder just throws errors rather than results, Search Lucene API isn't ported to D7 and SOLR isn't an option (shared hosting for a non-profit).
This can't be an uncommon request and I'd be grateful for any pointers in the right direction.