With version 1.8.1 - Use the whereSearch parameter to specify in which fields you would like search your data.
See AS wiki documentation.
by default &whereSearch=`content|tv` which means that the data are searched in :pagetitle,longtitle,description,alias,introtext,menutitle,content of the document and in tv_value of each tv linked to the documents.
For instance to limit the search to pagetitle and longtitle of documents
only, writes
&whereSearch=`content:pagetitle,longtitle`
You could also search in all the fields but define the ranking of results with the rank parameter.
for instance &rank=`pagetitle:100,longtitle:10,extract`. In this example, a term found in pagetitle give a result weight of 100, 10 in longtitle and 1 in extract (you could also define the extract. By default= 1:content,description,introtext,tv_content).