Think of controllers as just one of the entry points for your application, so you should have as little code as possible. I say this because there may be other entry points, such as commands, APIs, etc.
In general, most of the code in my applications resides in models (which for me are representations of the application entities, which in turn are replicated in the database); in repositories (responsible for bringing an instance or collection of entities); and services (which are responsible for performing a specific task in the application).
Returning to your question, you say that you want to search for news stories. I would do it like this:
Have a method in the driver mapped to the route (for example) /noticias/destaques . The method could be called NoticiasController::destaquesAction .
Have a Noticia entity, which represents the news in your database, and a NoticiasRepository class, responsible for bringing news or a collection of news.
Have a NoticiasRepository::getNoticiasEmDestaque method that returns a collection of featured news, sorted to your liking.
Lastly, call this method from your controller and render it in the view.
That's the way I usually develop my applications. If you have any opinion, just let me know. :)
