Relevanssi – A Better Search
Relevanssi replaces the default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance. It also indexes comments and shortcode content.
4.8
(405 ratings)Will this break my store?
What the WordPress.org registry says about keeping Relevanssi – A Better Search running.
Tested to 7.0.2
Tested against the WordPress branch in use today.17 days ago
At least 4.7 releases a year since launch. WordPress.org only lists versions still available for download, so the real number may be higher.7.1
Your host must be running at least this version.4.9
47% of 15 recent threads resolved
From the plugin's WordPress.org support forum.1
A single maintainer. Worth knowing if the plugin is load-bearing for your store.Maintenance & trust
Scored on how Relevanssi – A Better Search is looked after — not on how many stores run it.
91
out of 100Maintenance
35 / 35WordPress compatibility
20 / 20Support responsiveness
12 / 20Merchant satisfaction
14 / 15Listing transparency
10 / 10Ratings
4.8
405 ratingsRelevanssi 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.
You can find solutions and answers at the Relevanssi Knowledge Base.
Answers to many common problems can be found from the contextual menu. Just click “Help” in the top right corner of your WordPress admin dashboard on the Relevanssi settings page.
If you the results don’t change after installing and activating Relevanssi, the most likely reason is that you have a call to query_posts() on your search results template. This confuses Relevanssi. Try removing the query_posts() call and see what happens.
Please read Words with punctuation can’t be found. This is a Relevanssi feature, but you can fix it from Relevanssi indexing settings.
See the top of the admin menu. There’s ‘User searches’.
Relevanssi stores the relevance score it uses to sort results in the $post variable. Just add something like
echo $post->relevance_score
to your search results template inside a PHP code block to display the relevance score.
Relevanssi offers Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions. See “Did you mean” suggestions in the Knowledge Base for more details.
It’s the basic weighing scheme used in information retrieval. Tf stands for term frequency while idf is inverted document frequency. Term frequency is simply the number of times the term appears in a document, while document frequency is the number of documents in the database where the term appears.
Thus, the weight of the word for a document increases the more often it appears in the document and the less often it appears in other documents.
Each document database is full of useless words. All the little words that appear in just about every document are completely useless for information retrieval purposes. Basically, their inverted document frequency is really low, so they never have much power in matching. Also, removing those words helps to make the index smaller and searching faster.
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