Ubercart

I don't have any experience with those, but I was in contact w/ Blake about his Google SoC project before I left. He was doing what he called a fuzzy search module which allows for misspellings and some other things. I wanted to give it a test drive here but didn't get the chance since I was cranking out the new site all that week. Might be worth looking into. (You can test it on his blog... for example, search for ubercat.)

Initially, I was looking for a "Drupal way" to search just nodes of type product (i.e. using the form API). (The problem was - and still is - that I couldn't find a way to tell the block search form how to search just products.)

Then, I realized, it was going to be equally tricky to get the search results displayed in a grid. I had a view already in place for the catalog that displays my products in a grid, with a filter by taxonomy term. After that, I found Robert's article on custom search forms with Views and Fastsearch. This is the way I'm currently going, because this technique gives me the search result in the same grid like in the catalog view.

Not exactly answering Andy's questions, but telling about UC needs...

Yuck, why customize the results, just take the customer to the view of either the product or the category/subcat.
Any idea how to accomplish this?