Integrating website into search engine

[tm21]

Now that we have the option to search the SQL database directly in vbulletin would it be possible to add additional tables of content from html pages? I would like to be able to integrate my website into the vbulletin search. I currently use a separate database and search engine for querying the website.

[Andreas]

I guess you can, as there are several Hooks in search.php.
Could you elaborate a bit more what you want to achieve?

[tm21]

Well I was hoping to be able to allow the members of my forum to get search results from pages within my website. Most people who come to my site either know about the website, but not the forum, or they know about the forum but not the website (the vast majority is this latter case). It is my desire to clue in my forum members as to the vast array of content in the website. I have links to the website in the header and footer, and a seperate search engine, but people still can't seem to find it. If they see it in the search results they will find it (I hope).

I have also been planning on adding a search engine to go through PDF documents available to our subscribers. These documents are stored on a seperate server. I have a search engine that can spider both websites and PDF documents on different servers, and the results end up in a SQL database. If I could somehow combine this database with the vbulletin database and allow everything to be searchable from one engine in would make searching for information at my site ever so easy.

Having three seperate searches for the same things seems to be something most people just don't want to do. Even having vbulletin send the search query to the other search engines and returning the results in seperate frames would be fine.