Afternoon

How to get a limited number of rows of results back varies from database to database. You didn't mention which database you're using, but in MySQL, for example, the syntax is:

SELECT * FROM foo LIMIT 5, 10;
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This would fetch 10 rows, starting from the 5th row. If you're not using MySQL, you'll need to have a quick search, as I can't remember Oracle or Pg off the top of my head.

To make searching any reasonably big corpus of data acceptably fast, you probably need to make use of an index; which is a table of words and phrases matched to the documents that contain them. Looking through every word of every document for every search is just too sloooooow. Take a look at this recent article on perl.com for more info if you're interested in writing your own search engine from scratch in perl.

Alternatively, since writing a search engine is a complicated (though very interesting) exercise, consider using a ready-to-go free search engine that you can install and use on your server, for example Swish-E (perl) or htDig (not perl). I've used the latter with fairly satisfying results.

Lastly, have a search round the monastery, as this kind of thing has been discussed on a few occasions before.

update: added answer to the obvious question at the top. stupid me.

cheers
ViceRaid