The core Search module in Drupal 7 is great for simple search pages. However, the configuration options are fairly limited. If you want to change the look and feel of the search results, you could use the Display Suite Search sub-module that ships with Display Suite.
If you want flexibility and control over your search pages, then you should take a serious look at the Search API module. The biggest benefit of using the module is that it supports a number of search backends like Apache Solr and MongoDB or you can store the index directly into a database.
In this video, we’ll create a custom search page using Views and Search API for the results. For simplicity we’ll use the Search API Database Search module as the backend.
Modules
drush dl search_api search_api_db entity views ctools