X-Cart should do a fulltext search and then utilize the relevancy feature so that you can return results that are actually relevant with the most relevant items first. You can also implement boolean operators. This makes much more sense than doing a general like query to get thousands of mostly irrelevant results and then sorting them so the most relevant results could be no where near the top.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-boolean.html
I had created this functionality for X-Cart as early as 2004.