About this plugin
Opensolr Search replaces WordPress’s default search with a powerful, hosted Apache Solr search engine. It combines traditional keyword search with AI-powered vector search for dramatically better relevance.
Key Features:
- Hybrid Search — combines keyword matching (BM25) with semantic vector search (1024-dim embeddings) for the best of both worlds
- Faceted Navigation — filter results by category, price range, date, custom fields, and hierarchical taxonomies
- AI Hints — streaming AI-generated answers above search results, powered by RAG
- AI Reader — full-screen AI summary of any search result
- Chat Bot — a chat window on your site that answers your visitors from your content, run by Opensolr. The Chat Bot tab links straight to its settings for your index; one switch there shows it on every page of your site, or add its embed code to the pages you choose
- Autocomplete — real-time search suggestions with query history and Solr results
- WooCommerce Support — index products with prices, categories, SKUs, and structured data
- Two Indexing Methods — Web Crawler (automatic) and Data Ingestion API (push from WordPress)
- Search Analytics — track queries, clicks, CTR, no-results queries, and visitor patterns
- Query Elevation — pin or exclude specific results for any query
- Persistent Filters — admin-defined include/exclude filters applied to every search
- Multilingual — automatic locale filtering for WPML and Polylang sites
- Dark Theme — built-in dark mode for the search page
- Embeddable — use native search or embed the Opensolr hosted search widget
How It Works:
- Sign up at opensolr.com and get your API key
- Install the plugin and enter your credentials
- Create a search index or connect to an existing one
- Configure your sitemap and start the web crawler
- Your search page is live at /opensolr-search
The plugin generates a complete sitemap, injects meta tags for the crawler to extract, and provides a full search experience with zero load on your WordPress server — all search queries go directly to the Opensolr cloud.
Requirements:
- An Opensolr account (free tier available)
- PHP 8.1 or higher
- WordPress 6.0 or higher
External services
com ) to provide hosted search. You must have an Opensolr account; all indexing and search queries flow through these services. The service is required for core plugin functionality and cannot be self-hosted.
Service provider
- Opensolr — hosted Solr search cloud and AI API
- Privacy policy: https://opensolr.com/learn/privacy-policy
- Terms of service: https://opensolr.com/learn/terms-of-service
- Account signup (free tier available): https://opensolr.com/register
Endpoints the plugin contacts
- https://opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/* — account management, index create/reload, config upload, sitemap registration, elevation toggle, crawl start/stop/stats. Called from WordPress admin (not from visitors’ browsers).
- https://api.opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/ingest — Data Ingestion API: pushes your post content + metadata to the search index. Called from the WordPress site (cron worker and the real-time sync on post save/delete), never from visitors.
- https://api.opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/embed — generates a 1024-dim semantic embedding for the current search query (AI/hybrid search path only). Called from the WordPress site on every AI/hybrid search.
- https://api.opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/embed_and_search — finds the documents in your own index that an AI Hints answer should be based on. Called from the WordPress site only when the admin has enabled AI Hints.
- https://api.opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/ai_summary — streams the AI Hints / AI Reader answer. Called from the WordPress site only when the admin has enabled those features.
- https://<your-solr-host>.solrcluster.com/solr/<your-index>/select — the Solr search request itself (host provided by Opensolr when you create an index). Called from the WordPress site on every search.
- https://search.opensolr.com/embed.js — loaded ONLY if the admin switches Search Mode to “Embeddable”. In Native mode (the default), this script is never loaded.
Data sent to these services
- Your Opensolr email + API key (authentication).
- Your site’s host name ( meta_domain ).
- For ingestion: post titles, content, URL, excerpt, author display name, taxonomy terms, publish dates, WooCommerce price + category + SKU, featured-image URL. Only for the post types you explicitly enable in the plugin settings. Never includes user login data, email addresses, or passwords.
- For search: the search query string, the active facet filters, pagination position.
- For AI features (when enabled): the search query, plus the text of the top 4 matching documents from your own index, so the AI can compose an answer grounded in your content. This is your own already-indexed content being sent back for the answer — nothing new is collected from visitors.
- For click tracking (when enabled): the clicked result URL, title, position, the search query, and a SHA-256 hash of the visitor’s IP (never the raw IP). Analytics can be disabled from the plugin’s Search Display settings.
com if you explicitly enable Embeddable mode).