RSS Feed of Search Results
 

I'm interested in creating an RSS feed of search results from vBulletin, so that I can stream links to relevant results dynamically to external search results pages (e.g., if I have a non-vB database on cars, and someone searches for Toyota, I can return both the result set from my non-vB database and (say) a set of links to the five highest-ranking search results from vBulletin). This is opposed to the standard way of doing things such as dynamically-generating a hyperlink "click here to search our forums for Toyota!" which sends the searcher "off-page".

(I particularly want to do this to stream result sets from vbAdvanced Image Gallery)

I'm looking for advice on the best approach to do this.

I've installed commercial versions of both CaRP and Grouper from RSS Tools. This gives me the option for two different approaches (or more if someone can suggest differently!):

1) hack search.php to generate a hidden and temporary XML file at the same time it outputs the search results. CaRP can then be used to snag the XML file, cache it (so the original file is no longer necessary) and display the feed (the same could also be done with something like the open source Magpie RSS parser, and would have more benefit to the community, I suppose)

2) create a new version of search.php, say, rss_search.php which is used only from the external query (protected by htaccess perhaps), and simplify it so that Grouper can scrape the web page (and convert through regular expressions the search results to RSS), cache its search results, which are then read by CaRP (and cached again).

Thoughts or suggestions? I admittedly hoped it wouldn't be this difficult to do this, but the way search results are handled natively in vBulletin seems to preclude scraping the result set directly with Grouper.

Thanks.

*bump*

BUMP...
3.x and 3.5 would be nice.
Guys this is good for position on the web trust me

Thoughts anyone?

I'm wondering if the best way to do this is to simply bypass vBulletin altogether, and query the DB directly. Of course, you then get the problem of potentially having results from private forums.

Does anyone know if any current mods support this? I haven't been able to find any, and *wow* are there ever a lot to search through.

I'd be interested in this too, if anyone has any ideas

I'm going to bump this as I think it's something that would be fantastically useful, but just doesn't seem to be out there. What is should do is allow users to create their own RSS feeds: ie: yoursite.com/external.php?type=search&q=fast+cars
which will then use the search engine to collect hits, and then format it into RSS format.

Any ideas?

Bump, I also want this.

bump again ... looking to feed search results onto non-vb pages myself.

c'mon modders ... just think of the seo sauce that could make! :)