My experience with Drupal has been very good, given that I'm a non-techie, and I had given both Drupal and Joomla a try.. You can virtually create any type of site with Drupal. Excellent community support is an added advantage; the learning curve is not really steep if you know how to follow instructions given in the community word by word..
^ there is some built in custom search feature in drupal... dunno the exact location though., but i've seen it... just search around and you'll find it.