Search filtering

I looked around in the forums and the documentation for an answer for a bit and couldn't find anything so I thought I'd post.  We're a really large organization (currently approaching 7000 pages) and we'll be subdivided quite a bit within the Sitefinity architecture.  For instance one of our 3 top level organizations is the College of Medicine consisting of 17 or so departments each with heavy content on their own individual sites.

I couldn't seem to find a way to filter a search based upon where you are in the hierarchy.  For instance besides the College of Medicine we also have a Clinical Services section consisting of Adult and Children's as well as Hospital Services etc.. I'm wanting to provide a potential medical student who is on a department page under the College of Medicine to be able to search only on that site's page and all pages below it OR be able to toggle they want to search the whole site including other content items like Blogs and News and such.  I'm willing to do some dev work on this I'm just wondering where I should start.  

Hello Tony,

The search which comes with Sitefinity out of the box is indexing the content in all pages.

For customized search you have to implement a custom pipe. You can see how the TxtDocumentSearchInboundPipe in the sample project from  Publishing system brief walkthrough.  This is creating a pipe that will push the items into the search index when they are published. The only requirement is to be published by the fluent api. You have to implement PushData and ToPublishingPoint. Those methods will actually put the item into the publishing point. Note that you have to add some settings / mappings as it was explained in Registering custom pipes in Sitefinity

Greetings,
Stanislav Velikov
the Telerik team