Relevanssi – Better search for WordPress

Let’s face the facts: WordPress search sucks. The search lists the results in date order, latest first. This is rarely useful. It also searches for the exact query, nothing less and nothing more. In particular, if you’re using WP as a content-management system instead of just running a small blog, the basic search will leave you in trouble.

Most replacements or enhancements don’t really fix what’s broken. wpSearch does, but it has other issues. At least for me, it causes pretty serious hangups when editing posts, the indexing of a new post is very slow when you have ~900 posts in the database. So, it’s not ideal.

Enter Relevanssi (Finnish for “relevance”), a new WordPress search with following features:

• Relevance-sorted results, so the best results are first.
• Very simple, yet effective search engine.
• Fuzzy matching to make finding results easier.
• Easy installation.
• Updates index automatically and quickly.
• Modifying the stop word list used by the indexing is possible and simple.
• Indexing can be set to include only posts, only pages or both.
• Relevanssi can index comments, tags and custom fields.
• Relevanssi can also expand shortcodes before indexing documents.
• The plugin comes stop word lists in several languages besides English.
• Search results show the part of the document where the search term is.
• Search terms are highlighted in the results, with several different methods available.
• Search term logging.
• Search results can be limited to certain categories or tags.
• Certain categories or tags can be excluded from the search results.
• Custom post types and taxonomies can be included in the index.

The matching engine Relevanssi uses is a fairly simple and in some ways limited, but it is a significant improvement over basic WordPress search and offers the necessary functionality for most users.

Download Relevanssi

Relevanssi at WP Plugin directory

References

Relevanssi was mentioned on Kevin Leary’s list of 10 Perfect Plugins for Building a WordPress CMS. Kevin called Relevanssi “a small little gem” and said “All in all a great little plugin I highly recommend for any WordPress install, CMS or not.”

Eric Amundson of IvyCat.com recommends Relevanssi in his personal blog: Make WordPress Search Relevant with Relevanssi. Eric says “Relevanssi is an indispensable WordPress plugin and I encourage anyone using WordPress to try it and support its development. Trust me, you’ll never go back.”.

Jon of Armchair Theorist included Relevanssi on his list of 5 Useful but Lesser Known WordPress Plugins and says he was able to create a search experience that was “Relevant. Neat. User-friendly. Useful.”

Kirk McElhearn of Kirkville recommends Relevanssi in his entry Improved Searches on Kirkville with Relevanssi: “Thanks to Mikko for developing this plug-in; it’s very useful, and I think a lot of other WordPress users will want to try it out.”

TodoWordPress recommends Relevanssi: “Relevanssi, un muy buen script que nos indexará comentarios, tags, campos personalizados, así como por supuesto títulos y contenidos, y nos formateará la página de resultados por relevancia.”

Pelfusion lists Relevanssi at #1 in their list of 20 Must Have WordPress CMS Plugins.

See it in action

• IvyCat Website Services, they also have a separate Knowledgebase search using the (in English)
• MMeOw (in English)
• Le blog de Li-An (in French)
• Lautapeliopas (in Finnish)
• Kirjavinkit (in Finnish)
• Mahjong-opas (in Finnish)
• Texas Holdem Pokeri (in Finnish)

Show your appreciation

If you like the plugin and use it in your blog, how about writing a post about it? While your visitors will notice the improved search results, they won’t notice a sign about the plugin, so they won’t know what made the search better. A blog post about Relevanssi would help both me and your readers, in case they have WP blogs in need of better search.

If you think Relevanssi is worth money to you, any donations are welcome, you can see the PayPal button above (and if you don’t, I’m msaari at iki.fi in PayPal). However, Relevanssi is free, you can use it freely without paying me anything and the source code is included, so you can use it any way you want as long as you honor the GNU Public License.