The paper presents a comprehensive search framework that deals with different types of artifacts and therefore is suitable for situations where the information need behind a search request is sketchy. Such situations are characteristic for the product development domain, on which our research is focused. To support design engineers, various search concepts for specific computer aided engineering (CAE) document types, like e.g. 3D shape similarity methods, have been proposed. Although these methods might be beneficial for certain situations, there is a strong demand for a more generic approach that enables goal-oriented as well as exploratory searching for multiple artifacts such as products, documents, and materials. Hence, we base our framework on the ideas of faceted search, ranking, query-by-example, and parallel coordinates. Furthermore, we extend these concepts by artifact type hierarchies facilitating the generation of artifact type-specific facet data and the adaptability of this integrated approach for other domains as well.