Speeding Up Searches

My Access DB has two Number fields and five Text fields (each having field size of 200). They contain text. The DB is organised year-wise. I have now crossed 15000 records. I find that the search is very slow. Search is done on all these text fields for each word typed. Some one suggested that I index the fields to speed up the search. When I tried to change the indexes to Yes, it didnt accept. Is there any other way to speed up search?

As an alternative, I created an append query to append records of the year I select in my form to another table so that I can search that table instead of the main table which contains all years records. But the append query is not appending records.

Any solution would be appreciated