[support] Drupal 7: Search Woes

[Al Sessions]

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.

-- 
Al Sessions