I've recently encountered this problem and after a frustrating week of trying to find the 'lazy' way of integrating mnogosearch I think I've found a way. I used the mnogo search template to construct a JSON response, rather than have it spit out content. This has two benefits, now it can be called in my perl code eg.

my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'http://localhost/cgi-bin/search.c
+gi?q=a query' );

my $res = $ua->request($req);
my $json_results;
if ($res->is_success) {
    $json_results = $json->decode($res->content);
}
else {
    die $res->status_line, "\n";
}
[download]

but it can also be called from other places! It's essentially a web service. Cheers, Adam T.