We have a new installation of Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express Edition on one server and it's nicely indexing our intranet (on another server) which we can search from the provided search form on the search server.
I'd like to customise the search results so that they actually look like our intranet has generated them and also place the search form's textbox and submit button on the intranet pages themselves. The existing, provided search form appears to be an ASP.NET page and performs a postback so it's not like I can just duplicate that in my intranet classic ASP code and anyway, I'd end up with some pre-formatted HTML returned when I'm just after some raw XML to transform/format myself.
Is there some URL that I can access the search server with, passing the query parameter(s) and have it return some valid XML that I can then, via ASP, or ASP.NET perform a tranformation using XSLT?
All the customisation articles I seem to come across on the Web refer to creating Sharepoint Web Parts and using them on an ASP.NET page and that's (Sharepoint Web Parts) something I know nothing about :(
I currently do just what I'm looking for with a Google Mini appliance, calling a URL with search terms tacked onto the URL and use XSLT to transform the returned XML search results into something that, style-wise at least, matches our (mainly) classic ASP intranet. However, we want to look at using Microsoft Search Server 2008 to perform the same task if possible.