Rails 3.0 - is there a built-in search functionality in any of ActiveRecord classes?

I'm kind of new to rails - I'm currently learning by developing a web-app, similar to the Agile Rails book (with iteration and all).

Knowing rails, I know there's a great way to search in the database. So my question simply is: what is the good way to do 开发者_如何学编程so? - the rails way.

Search criteria are classics (keywords in sentences, strings, ...) AND a "near" search.

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We're using Sphinx here. It's a fulltext search engine, if you're looking for that.