About this plugin
WordPress searches your posts with a database LIKE query. It gets slower as your site grows, it cannot tell an important match from a passing mention, and it orders results by date rather than by how well they match.
Search Hero replaces that with a proper search index of your content, so results come back ranked by how relevant they actually are.
How results are ranked
- Every word you search for has to appear in a post for it to match. The one exception is a word so common it turns up in almost every post on your site, like “the”, which tells us nothing about which post you want and is ignored.
- Rare words count for more than common ones, so a post about your search term beats one that merely mentions it.
- Words found close together score higher, so a search for several words favours posts where they appear as a phrase.
- Matches in a short post count for more than the same matches buried in a long one.
As you type
Results appear under your search box as visitors type. Each search box covers one kind of content: a normal search box searches your posts, and a product search box searches products. There is a [search_hero_search post_type="product"] shortcode for a search box on any page, and the same instant results appear on the admin post list, where they take you straight to the editor.
What gets indexed
Every public post type that is searchable: posts, pages, custom post types, and products. Each one is indexed into its own tables, so Products can be rebuilt without touching Posts, and a rebuild of one leaves the rest searchable throughout. Choose which ones on the settings page; developers can narrow or widen the choices with the search_hero_indexed_post_types filter.
It stays up to date on its own
Index once after installing. From then on, publishing, editing, unpublishing, trashing, restoring and deleting content all update the index as they happen. There is nothing to re-run.
No external service
The index lives in your own database. Nothing about your content is sent anywhere, there is no API key, and there is no per search cost.