How I can get search form value in Drupal 7 - content-management-system

Question

I've tried to implement a new module that catches the keys written in the default search form and displays other results than the default search result page. With these other results I will make an external query, which is put in a special block.
Any idea on how to do this?
I've tried to use a custom module making a "hook_alter_form " with no success.
In other words :
I have a function like this:
function my_function_name_form_alter(&$form,&$form_state,$form_id){
switch($form_id){
case 'search-block-form':
//Here i want to catch the text that i wrote in the search box
break;
}
}
Thank u!

Answer 1

You can alter the search query in order to show other results:
function mymodule_query_alter(QueryAlterableInterface $query){
$is_search = FALSE;
foreach ($query->getTables() as $table) {
if ($table['table'] == 'search_index') {
$is_search = TRUE;
}
}
if ($is_search) {
global $language;
$db_or = db_or();
$db_or->condition('n.type', 'event', '=');
$db_or->condition('n.type', 'real_sitio', '=');
$query->condition($db_or);
$query->condition('n.language' , $language->language, '=');
}
}
This is a bit performance killer so there's a patch for drupal at http://drupal.org/node/1435834 that adds a hook for making the alter directly in the search query:
So finally it would look like:
function mymodule_search_query_search_node_alter(&$query) {
$query->condition('n.type', 'article', '=');
}