Search by date - Need a hack

Hi.

I need to modify the search component so I can search content items published on a given day. Let's say I want to search in my content all the articles created or publshed on April 2006, or more specifically on April 23 2006. I want to allow users to do this.

I understand a bit of php and I know I have to work on the files search.php and search.html.php but I am having some issues. I ask the user to pick up a date (in the format - yyyy-mm-dd), then I have to compare this date with the ones in the table content. The problem is that the date of creation and the date of publication in the table content are in the format (yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm:ss).

Can someone please help me with this? I think this would be a great hack.

Jerson Figueiredo.