Search Models are a very elegant and powerful way to build an Active Data Provider. If you use them a lot, you'll quickly need to use scenarios, which will lead you to a very DRY Controller code.
Yii Framework Wiki
Wiki articles in category Tips tagged with "search"
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Adding Yii Search to Your Browser Search Box
The official Yii project site now supports OpenSearch. This means you can customize your browser's search box to enable direct search of the content in yiiframework.com. For example, by entering a Yii class name in the browser's search box, the corresponding class API page will be shown in the browser.