You might not have noticed this, but WordPress has one intrinsic flaw that absolutely nobody seems to care at all about; The built-in search. I suppose that for many people it’s fine just to get a smattering of semi-random results when you look for them, but as someone who has coded search functions and as someone who searches for information regularly, there are several massive problems that present themselves in the off the shelf search algorithm that ships with even the latest version of WordPress and WordPress MU.
The problem is that the search function in WordPress is strictly keyword-based. It doesn’t look for any real relevance, nor does it weigh any one portion of the results more heavily than another. For a blog like my food and recipe blog this can lead to results that have absolutely nothing to do with the search terms entered.
In my case, each post links to other, similar posts. Sometimes these posts reference recipes with similar methods, but that may not include the same main ingredient as the recipe I’ve written. In the case of a pork dish that references a chicken dish at the end, the WordPress search doesn’t see any reason not to return “Pork Sate” in a search for “chicken”, or in-fact, any post with the word “chicken” in it. These are returned in chronological order, so the results can be confusing.
The Search Unleashed WordPress plugin solves these issues quickly and simply. Not only does it give the option for standard wordPress searches (if these are working for you) and an indexed WordPress search (faster), but for full blown MySQL Fulltext or Lucene searching, which return results that you would expect from a mjor search engine. Right on your WordPress blog
Configuration is pretty simple, as illustrated here:
In short, this is one plugin that you absolutely should install if you want relevant results for searches on your WordPress blog. setup is nearly painless and even on a blog with a lot of information o index, it doesn’t bring normal operations to a standstill while it’s working, unlike other search plugins I’ve tried.
Check it out for yourself. Search Unleashed is one plugin that you shouldn’t be without.
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