Gameblog

WordPress search plugin plug

This has nothing do with games, so if you don’t have a WordPress blog, skip on. If you do have a WordPress blog, there’s something I want to tell you.

The default WordPress search sucks.  It has very simple matching and always returns results in date order, most recent first. In small blogs this might be fine, but in the long run simply doesn’t work. Fortunately there’s a solution.

I was happy with a plugin called wpSearch for a long time, but eventually found it lacking – it couldn’t keep up with the blog. So I did my own search engine, and thus was born Relevanssi. After all, I’m a trained professional with an appropriate university degree!

Relevanssi does partial matching (like Google) and sorts order by relevancy (like Google). It can also make suggestions of better search terms (like Google). It also shows the relevant part of the post (like Google), with the search terms highlighted (like Google). It also searches posts, pages, comments, categories, custom fields and all sorts of data basic WordPress search ignores.

All in all, it’s a pretty amazing little search engine plugin. What’s best, it’s free and easy to use, yet it has lots of useful options to tune the search results to your liking if you’re so inclined.

Just search for “Relevanssi” in your WordPress admin dashboard’s “Add Plugin” tool and you too can offer top-quality search results to your users. The plugin is currently very actively maintained and new features are added constantly. If you have something useful in mind, drop me an email and I can see if it’s something that could be added to Relevanssi.

Mikko

7 responses to “WordPress search plugin plug”

  1. Well, for me, it is gaming relevant, since I also host wordpress blogs that talk of gaming. I am going to test your plugin, and thank you already for creating it!

  2. And it works! Extremely well, in fact! I I am going to recommend it, and paypal you a little something for a coffee or so! 🙂

  5. First, a disclaimer: I run Area 42 Games and I have spent the last few days improving the search engine for our site (mostly from the point of view of the results looking prettier). We use Sphider to crawl our WordPress blog, our meetup site and of course our storefront.

    Does your wordpress plug in allow for the searching of external sites? If it does I would love to give it a whirl. I have finally tamed Sphider enough that I am happy with it, but there are still a few searches that give me weird results and I don’t quite know why (and I too have a relevant university degree).

    Joe H.

  6. Sorry, it’s purely WordPress. Indexing external sites would make things a lot more complicated, the process is so much based on WordPress functions. Relevanssi doesn’t do any spidering, for example, it just hooks on to the WordPress update hooks to index documents when they are created and updated.