I'm kinda new to Drupal and I would like some advises.

I have a Drupal website, with a few nodes (1000 - 5000) of a particular content type, let's say a "House".

This "House" content type has a few properties (20) like `price`, `location`, `number of rooms`, etc.

In order to allow my end users to find those nodes, I've build an advanced search with the [Finder](http://drupal.org/project/finder) module.

However, this module is no longer maintained and it is not really appropriate to search through many nodes.

> 
> Finder does not work like a typical search module, it does not base
>  it's functionality on search indexes, and therefore is not an
>  efficient choice for searching body content, though it can technically
>  do that. It is more suitable for filtering on short field values.
> 
> 
> 

What are the **best options to build an advanced multi criteria search with Drupal 7** ?
Do I need to do it by hand ? What are the modules out there that could help achieving that ?

Is [Facet API](http://drupal.org/project/facetapi) the way to go ?