How to Improve Search Function in WP [Using Plugins]
Current Wordpress search limitations
- Results sorted by date, not relevance. May not be an issue if your posts are time sensitive. But most likely you want your visitors to find the best matched post instead the newest matched post.
- Only posts are searchable; pages, comments etc are not. May not be an issue if you only have a few pages with unimportant info (e.g contact). But if you rely heavily on pages for your content (e.g CMS), you are out of luck..
..but where limitations sets in, Wordpress plugin authors always come to the rescue 
I won’t be listing the tons of search plugins available. Just the one that I like, works well and a breeze to install.
Must Have Plugins
Search Unleashed
Function: Full text search in posts, pages, comments
Installation: Plug & Play with many options in admin panel
Demo: A search for “occurrences” returns result from comments.
Optional But Nice to Have Plugins
Nice Search
Function: Beautify your search url by redirecting ?s=query searches to /search/query
Installation: Plug & Play
Demo: Just do a search on author’s blog
Search Spelling Suggestion
Function: Displays a suggested spelling correction for a given term (like google)
Installation: Add only a line of code to your search template
Demo: Search for “computor” and the search page will display “Did you mean: computer”.
Search Meter
Function: Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for.
Installation: Plug & Play
Demo: Admin Panel Screenshot
Some notes
With the above plugins, there remain one limitation: sort by relevance. The only plugin that address this issue is Wordpress Advanced Search. Unfortunately it is not compatible with WP 2.3 right now. Installation is slightly more complicated but still manageable. And I suspect it may not work well with the above “optional but nice to have” plugins.
[Up Next]: How to address all the issues by outsourcing your search to Google
Read More… Genkisan
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