REQ: Replace WordPress Search with Yahoo Search

I would like to replace the default search engine with Yahoo! search. Reasons are:
– not a fan of the wordpress search results page
– want to be able to search on posts and images
– images are actually located in gallery2 not WP
– implementing within wordpress would allow me to inherit the theme (hopefully)

I started looking into this to do myself, but I think it’s beyond my reach at this point. Where I’ve gotten so far:

– The Yahoo search api has already been used to replace search here at www.remarpro.com. Someone knows it. ??
– The Yahoo search api can also be used for the Yahoo image search (Google cannot)
– There’s some good base code for overriding search that can be found in the “search reloaded” plugin here https://www.semiologic.com/projects/search-reloaded/

What I was thinking of attempting was to intercept the wordpress search request, pass it to yahoo, get results back, and return the search text to wordpress for formatting and display.

The results display page would default to “post results” but would have an additional tab or link to “image results”. This search images feature would submit the same query to the yahoo image search api and return results appropriately formatted for images.

Admin options would be:
– scope of search (ie limit to this site or set of sites)
– make image search option available to users?
– default to image search or text search?

Based on the writeup of how the search engine here at www.remarpro.com was created, I’m guessing that this isn’t actually a big deal. But as I noted above, when I started looking at the code required I realized quickly that this isn’t a great first project in PHP or WP for me.

Any takers?