custom search for a retail site

I was at the SES conference in NewYork and attended a session on Site Search. Apparently studies have shown that many people immediately look for a search tool when they arrive at an ecommerce site. I am motivated to bring this to my retail sites.

I have not used a search utility because I don't like how they present the results. But I am working on a pseudo search that will serve what EGOL wants them to see when they type in the most common querries. This is essentially building a page on the fly with a script. I think that I can do this easily with a sequence of "IF" statements - when the condition is met the item is written to the search results - and I have a few standard items that I force to the top or immediately after key merchandise.

Has anyone built anything like this or has ideas to share?

I have built (muddled through) a couple of .asp search scripts. Here is a fairly simple one.

http://www.utrmusicgroup.com/search/search.asp

It's rather simple but work pretty well for this site. I am working on a much more complicated search for one of my own sites but the database table structure is so messed up (by me ) that it's taking a fair amount of my time and brain power to work out the kinks.

What language are you coding in?

Hey wrkalot,

Thanks for sharing that search with us. I really like the format that your results display in. Very clean and the image makes it really appealing. I think that adding images will shoot your conversion rates up a lot higher than they would have been otherwise. Nice work!

I am writing my "search" in perl.