title: Magento search customer by first name
body: <p>I am creating a magento extension and i need to search the customerbased on their firstname. I know i can do it with the help of sql. But i would like to use the customer model of magento to do the work.</p>
  
  <p>I have used this and it returns an array of all users but instead of all users i want specific users who matches the criteria.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$collection = Mage::getModel('customer/customer')-&gt;getCollection()-&gt;addAttributeToSelect('*');
  </code></pre>