Performing wordpress search from a plugin

What's the correct way of performing an article search from within a Wordpress plugin? I want to perform the search and get a list of matching pos开发者_如何学运维ts and pages back. That is I want the list back in the plugin code for further processing. I keep thinking there should be a function I can call, but I can't find it.

I have not worked with this plugin and I'm not entirely sure whether it serves search results in the way you need, but I think it does. Take a look at Wordpress Search API plugin.