Anyone got a good way of determining the type of a search column in SS2.0? currency/date/etc

I don't believe there's* a native way of doing this... but you could load the the first result of your search then use record.getField and then field.Type to get the type. It's not pretty, but it would get the job done...

const sales_order = record.load({
   type: record.Type.SALES_ORDER,
   id: 275
});

let memo_field = sales_order.getField({
    fieldId: 'memo'
});

let memo_field_type = memo_field.type