FV Swiftype for WordPress

Then we found Swiftype.

Swiftype is the best WordPress search plugin available. It’s not just the plugin, it’s also a service, so their powerful server crawl your website and put together a coherent search index which brings great results.

More than that, you get full control over the search results. For example you can specify which pages should show up at the top of the search results. You can adjust importance of various fields and so on.

There’s a free version of Swiftype works for free which suit someone starting a weblog and affordable plans for either active bloggers and professional and even enterprise sites. You can group search across a network of sites to yield results from all of them.

There’s two kinds of Swiftype serach:

WordPress database (Swiftype offers a plugin)

External crawler (no plugin available)

We far prefer the external crawler. If you use the WordPress database, there is the risk of member only documents or even unpublished documents appearing in search. With the external crawler you are able to control what shows up in search (only public pages) and even use your Swiftype search as a control your content is properly published and indexed.

With the external crawler, your search can cover the non-Wordpress parts of your site in a single index. For example:

online store

forums

help documents

If the document can be read on the web the external plugin can index it.

Our Solution: a WordPress plugin for Swiftype External Crawler

To allow us to quickly and reliably deploy Swiftype we wrote a WordPress plugin which replaces default WordPress search with the Swiftype external crawler search. It’s literally single click upload to start offering first rate results across all the sites and subdomains you want indexed.

And once you have search inside Swiftype you can drag and drop the results to make sure your most relevant or most lucrative page is indexed first.