First off, I want to say I am happy to have found web-mastertalk.com. It seems like an amazing resource and I feel lucky to be a part of it.

As a print designer that just had to take on more responsibilities due to the layoff of a coworker, I am trying to add some tools to my company's online store. We are using x-cart to sell our products and our search bar doesn't yield the results we wanted. I want to add a Google search bar to take the place of what's there now. My goal is to make it so a customer can be led to the product pages even if they misspell a word. The only success I had with this was being able to add the HTML coding that gave me a search bar but the search results displayed like a normal Google search. I want it to display like the current search displays results.

Sorry if this is a noob question but the only success I have had with that search bar did not yield the results I want.

Here is the site I am working on:

stonetooling.com

I'm going to go out on a limb here and offer my thoughts, but I might be wrong. I'm honestly the last person who ought to be answering this question, but, no one else is offering an answer, and a questionable one is better than none at all.

The reason you're getting regular Google search results with your Google site bar, is that's what it is. They have a massive database, and a way to query it for web pages with a certain key phrase. When you slap a copy on your site, you're still hitting the same database. If they don't know about a particular page during a regular search, they still won't know about it when someone chooses to search your site only.

I think most eCommerce sites use their own internal or 3rd party search engines to accomplish this. Endecca, FAST, DT-Search, etc.

I see what you're saying. What I did is create a search bar that does a custom search through our online store only. So when a customer is searching for a product, they will get a Google search of all the similar products on our site. My problem is that it displays like a Google search within our template. Here is an example of a site that has a search powered by Google that creates more accurate search results in a visually appealing way.

http://www.crlaurence.com/apps/sites...?query=railing

I just don't want to miss out on any potential sales because people aren't able to find what they want even if we are carrying it.

Is it only the visual appearance you want to change? It looks like they've added custom CSS class definitions, at a minimum.

Yeah I noticed those. As much as I love Google on a day-to-day basis, I think the excess of information they provide could be too much for our customers.

I really wish somebody who does this type of development regularly would show up to answer your questions. Again, I'll take a shot at it, but take anything I say with a grain of salt!

You might be able to hide some of the data they provide, that might confuse your customers, with CSS and display:none? That would be the easier, faster option. Failing that, I know they provide an AJAX search API, that might be of help - I would imagine it's a lot more customizable.

cool site