I am creating a real estate search from RETS data, but this is a general question. When you have a variety of columns that you would like the user to be able to filter their search result by, how do you optimize this?

For example, http://www.charlestonrealestateguide.com/listings.php has 16 or so optional filters. Granted, he only has up to 11,000 entries (I have the same data), but I don't imagine the search is performed with just a giant WHERE AND AND AND ... clause. Or is this typically accomplished with one giant multicolumn index?

Newegg, Amazon, and countless others also have cool & fast filtering systems for large amounts of data. How do they do it? And is there a database optimization reason for the tendency to provide ranges instead of empty inputs, or is that merely for user convenience?