Drupal search. I've had several sites that had search problems, before I got the PHP religion. There are also several DO forum topics discussing this. If cron suddenly breaks, this is almost certainly the cause. The only time I have a PHP page is when I'm testing something; then it gets module-ized and deleted.
Nancy
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
You may want to look at the Views module for creating report pages.
Nancy, when you say break search indexing are you talking about Drupal search of external search engines.