Some of the users using one of my Drupal sites were asking for search by author and creation date. The site had 3000+ nodes and the user’s request seemed reasonable enough. I first started with googling for a Drupal module or a patch that would add the functionality, but none were found.
So when ahead and hacked the node module. I sucessfully managed to add search by author and node creation date to advanced search block. If you are in searching for a patch like I did you can find it at http://drupal.org/node/233476, I’m keeping my fingers crossed to see whether it would make it to the Drupal trunk :).