To be somewhat complete on my WSS search efforts today, I should also mention the commercial Web part from they guys at Advis.
ADVIS Site Searcher is a customizable Windows SharePoint Services site searching web part. While the default search mechanism of WSS only searches the current site, ADVIS Site Searcher searches the current site and all its subsites.
- Search only documents, only list items, or both.
- Search the current site and all its subsites.
- Can replace the out-of-the-box WSS search page with this powerfull search.
Note that this Web part is not free but is a good solution if within your company you do not have the developers to support your SharePoint extensions.