Find Dad a Better Search Solution
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in 7 years.
Let’s face it: as great as WordPress is for building websites, its built-in search tools remind me of how I once felt about my Dad: clueless. I often find myself resorting to Google or Bing searches to find the page I’m looking for rather than using the built-in search engine.
Having said that, wouldn’t it be nice to have an on-site search tool that would actually produce helpful and relevant results?
Curtain up. Cue music. Enter Relevanssi stage left.
Suddenly, I’m astonished how much Wordpress search improves – and so will you!
This completely free plugin brings truly context-based search results to your WordPress blog with perfect pitch and artistic mastery. Popsb.com uses Relevanssi as do all current client web sites. Some key features, and advantages, of Relevanssi include:
Partial Matches – Even if the complete keywords do not match, Relevanssi will display content with partial words and phrases that match your search.
Better Sorting – Instead of ranking results by the dates the pages were published, as the WordPress search engine does, the plugin ranks content in the order of relevance.
More Search Control – Similar to major search engines, Relevanssi enables users to use search commands to narrow their results. For example, you can use OR or AND in order to require either or all of the search terms used. You can also search for specific phrases by placing the phrase in quotation marks.
Increased Field of Search – The plugin can be configured to search content pages, and also tags, categories, comments, and other custom fields.
Improved Result Navigation – Custom excerpts can be generated to show the most relevant areas of the content, and keywords and phrases can be highlighted.
User Information – Relevanssi also provides you with information that can enable you to improve your search engine optimization efforts. Within your WordPress dashboard, you can view collected search query data. This data tells you what your users are looking for, and at what frequency.
Relevanssi is a plugin that is free (download here), and easy to install to your WordPress site. It has a large number of configuration settings that enable you to customize the plugin to better meet your website’s needs. As a general rule, we install and configure it on all our client’s sites because it provides on-site search results that are much more helpful and relevant. And your web site will astonish you!
