Hi Joe,
Mind if I call you Joseph? We already have a Joe Davis in the community I'm going to mix you up sooner or later ;-)
This looks interesting, I was not familiar with these search provider definition files. It looks pretty straightforward, I will try and integrate support for this with autodiscovery in mojoPortal for the next release.
Currently our search page only works with POST requests not querystring GET requests, but I may change this to make it easier to implement this.
Not sure about the json search suggestion stuff though, that may be a taller order.
Best,
Joe