Lets say you want to provide users with a way to search for authors in CakePHP.
Your authors table looks something like ( id, firstname, lastname, bio ).
Usually when you want to search on something like this you would do the following.
SELECT * FROM authors WHERE lname LIKE '%Jon%' OR lname LIKE '%Jon%';
Great, you found Jon, but what if you replaced the above query with "Jon Doe"?
SELECT * FROM authors WHERE lname LIKE '%Jon Doe%' OR lname LIKE '%Jon Doe%';
Crap, we can't find Jon anymore. Okay how about the following:
SELECT * FROM authors WHERE concat(fname,' ',lname) like '%Jon Doe%';
Aha! We found Jon Doe again.
But what if we searched for "Doe Jon". Again, we are not able to find Jon Doe.
So now what? Well MySQL lets you build a fulltext index on multiple fields.
Execute the following query.
ALTER TABLE `authors` ADD FULLTEXT `fullname` (`fname`,`lname`);
This allows us to do things like
SELECT * FROM authors WHERE match(fname,lname) against ('doe jon' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
And still get Jon Doe. 
Now you can fight this fulltext search stuff all you want, but you're just going to end up with a huge query that doesn't perform as well as a fulltext query.
If you have a database that does not support this, then you should consider upgrading if you can.
Here is some code that creates a query that does a search on each field without fulltext indexing.
Using a fulltext query in CakePHP is a matter of using the following condition ( yes, this is very hacky looking ):
$paginator_options['conditions'] = array("1" => "1 AND MATCH(Author.fname,Author.lname) AGAINST('{$conditions['Author.search']}*' IN BOOLEAN MODE )");
$this->set('authors', $this->paginate($paginator_options));