Has anyone successfully integrated Sphider?
 

I’ve been playing with Sphider in order to find a solution to improve search results.
It uses a separate DB and it seems to be a great tool, even able to read and index pdf documents … But I don't find the way to integrate its results into x-cart.
Has anyone successfully integrated it? Maybe it's not worth the effort ... or maybe you might know better easier alternatives...
Thanks in advance.

Re: Has anyone successfully integrated Sphider?
 

You can create an html catalog and have sphider spider the html catalog, but then you have to customize sphider to use the store templates, which is not easy. The biggest downside which wasn't cost effective for my client to want to try to troubleshoot, was that search results didn't have images and weren't sortable by price, etc.

Re: Has anyone successfully integrated Sphider?
 

I think you don't even need to create an html catalog because Sphider indexes all the pages following the links, as search engines do... The beauty of it is that indexes all your content, not only the products catalogue! So results can contain static pages as well, or pdf documents (thus it make all the sense not having the results sortable by price or with images, but sortable by relevancy).

The real problem, as you said, is the amount of customization involved to use the store templates. I'm not very experienced with x-cart customizations, that's why I was asking if anyone succeeded with the integration... to evaluate if the effort is worth... (?)

I reckon integrating it can be extremely useful for anyone with attached documents, or simply to help lazy customers to find common answers (payment methods, etc...)