Improving WordPress Search : Update

This post was written 2 years 10 months 14 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

A couple of months ago, I talked about improving the search facility built into WordPress. However, soon after, I also mentioned problems I was having with the plugin Search Unleashed.

Sadly the plugin is no better and I’ve had it disabled all this time.

The friend that I originally researched this all for reported, however, that Search Unleashed was not reporting by relevance after all. Since then I’ve seen details on Better Search, an alternative plugin that (supposedly) does provide relevance-based results. I’d try it out and report back back but after my initial activation, I deactivated it again. Rather than build upon your existing search template, it uses its own. So, by default, the search page doesn’t even look like your theme – you have to start the layout, etc, from scratch. That’s not something I’d like to do unless I really wanted to use the plugin. And I’m not that fussed.

But if anybody else does give it a go, please let me know!