Create a Spotlight plugin that queries online data?

Question

This Mac OS Spotlight plugin queries Google and displays the search results in Spotlight:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/googleimporter.html

I understand how to make custom metadata importers. (I'd post a link but I'm not allowed to. Google "Create Spotlight Plugin" and go to first link.)

That's not really what I want to do though.
Let's say I want to create one for Yahoo - how would that work? How do you have Spotlight send your program the query string, and display results you return to it? And in what format do you return results?

Answer 1

There is no official API that lets you do this. The Google importer you linked to is not even a proper Spotlight plugin, it is an input manager hack that injects code into Spotlight to get its results to display. Apparently, this hack broke on Leopard, so it only even works at all on Tiger.