Combined Search vs Relevanssi – A Better Search

In today’s world, no WordPress Site Administrator should be without Combined Search. This uniquely formulated WordPress Plugin has been developed to allow Site Administrators like you to search for content that could not previously be searched for – like comments, category names, descriptions, custom taxonomies, and more. You can configure Combined Search to your heart’s content, enabling it to search pages, attachments, excerpts, drafts, tags, comments, metadata and (most) everything in-between. Need to exclude certain pages and posts? Done. Getting started is easy. Install via the WordPress dashboard or manually by downloading the plugin and adding it to your wp-content/plugins/ folder. Visit the Plugins page in your WordPress administration area, and click “activate”. Configure it to your liking, and you’re ready to start searching. PS: The only thing you can’t search is password-protected content, naturally. Combined Search can and will change the ability of the default WordPress Search; from highlighting to purely approved comments and so much more. Banner photo by Shane Hauser on Unsplash

Relevanssi replaces the standard WordPress search with a better search engine, with lots of features and configurable options. You’ll get better results, better presentation of results – your users will thank you. This is the free version of Relevanssi. There’s also Relevanssi Premium, which has added features. For more information about Premium, see Relevanssi.com. Do note that using Relevanssi may require large amounts (hundreds of megabytes) of database space (for a reasonable estimate, multiply the size of your wp_posts database table by three). If your hosting setup has a limited amount of space for database tables, using Relevanssi may cause problems. In those cases use of Relevanssi cannot be recommended. Key features Search results sorted in the order of relevance, not by date. Fuzzy matching: match partial words, if complete words don’t match. Find documents matching either just one search term (OR query) or require all words to appear (AND query). Search for phrases with quotes, for example “search phrase”. Create custom excerpts that show where the hit was made, with the search terms highlighted. Highlight search terms in the documents when user clicks through search results. Search comments, tags, categories and custom fields. Multisite friendly. bbPress support. Gutenberg friendly. Advanced features Adjust the weighting for titles, tags and comments. Log queries, show most popular queries and recent queries with no hits. Restrict searches to categories and tags using a hidden variable or plugin settings. Index custom post types and custom taxonomies. Index the contents of shortcodes. Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions based on successful user searches. Support for WPML multi-language plugin and Polylang. Support for s2member membership plugin, Members, Groups, Simple Membership and other membership plugins. Advanced filtering to help hacking the search results the way you want. Search result throttling to improve performance on large databases. Disable indexing of post content and post titles with a simple filter hook. Premium features (only in Relevanssi Premium) Indexing attachment content (PDF, Office, Open Office). Improved spelling correction in “Did you mean?” suggestions. Searching across multiple sites in the same multisite installation. Search and index user profiles. Search and index taxonomy term pages (categories, tags, custom taxonomies). Search and index arbitrary columns in wp_posts MySQL table. Assign weights to any post types and taxonomies. Assign extra weight to new posts. Let the user choose between AND and OR searches, use + and – operator (AND and NOT). Export and import settings. WP CLI commands. Related posts. Redirects for searches. Thanks Cristian Damm for tag indexing, comment indexing, post/page exclusion and general helpfulness. Marcus Dalgren for UTF-8 fixing. Warren Tape for 2.5.5 fixes. Mohib Ebrahim for relentless bug hunting. John Calahan for extensive 4.0 beta testing.