Comments on: There’s Gotta Be a Better Way To Search a WordPress Blog

By: Found. The WordPress Search Solution. Hewn by Hand. - CogDogBlog

Found. The WordPress Search Solution. Hewn by Hand. - CogDogBlog — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 05:49:46 +0000

[...] my blog- not that I care if you can find anything here, but its important that I do. Back in March I vented my frustration about the limits of WordPress search, yet despite the experiments with plugins, none of them really worked for me, and one of them just [...]

By: That Two Timing XML File - CogDogBlog

That Two Timing XML File - CogDogBlog — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:25:17 +0000

[...] wrote before about the power of creating a Custom Google Search engine (CSE) — using google’s search tools as a tool to [...]

By: Interview with Alan Levine! « Kaylamarlane's Blog

Interview with Alan Levine! « Kaylamarlane's Blog — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:43:03 +0000

[...] There’s Gotta Be a Better Way To Search A WordPress Blog [...]

By: Mikko Saari

Mikko Saari — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:19:47 +0000

No Boolean search in Relevanssi, just full text. My experience (and this is backed by Masters-level studies in the field) says nobody actually uses Boolean search, except maybe few pro searchers. Average Joe certainly doesn’t. Thus, not a top priority feature.

Relevanssi does support “phrase search” and searches tags, custom fields, categories, expanded shortcodes, comments and trackbacks. Negation operator is not yet supported, but might happen later on.

WordPress is my #1 choice for a CMS and a good search is a must. I had to write Relevanssi myself, because nothing else did the job the way I wanted.

By: Dean Groom

Dean Groom — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:17:49 +0000

Yey for Dean Groom

By: kyle

kyle — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:05:08 +0000

@D’Arcy

From what I’ve read, Matt would say that considering his aversion to using/building WordPress as a CMS. Posts and pages are the only content types he cares about. So chronological sorting and keyword hits is most important to him.

With greater occurrence of custom fields out of a) necessity and b) access via wp 3.0′s interface and plugins like Pods CMS, we’ll need to be able to fine-tune our searching to something much more specific than keywords/chronology.

In the meantime…. maybe check out “Search Engine” by one of the awesome Pods developers, Scott Kingsley Clark: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-engine/

~kyle~

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:09:59 +0000

The core WP search is borked. Always has been, likely always will be. I tried raising the point with Matt at NV a couple years ago, but he thought the dumb-search-and-reverse-chronological-display searching was just fine. Maybe that’s changed, but the search still sucks.

I use the excellent Relevanssi search plugin on mine. It does fulltext, and I believe boolean, searches – and sorts by relevance rather than date. woohoo.

http://www.mikkosaari.fi/relevanssi/

No need to rely on Google (or anyone else) to search your own database.

By: Chris Bell

Chris Bell — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:27:51 +0000

After working w/WP stand alone installs for about 4 years now, I am totally surprised they have not improved the core search function. However, how good is the core search in any CMS like Joomla, Drupal, etc.? I have found all of them to be seriously lacking. You can tweak things a bit behind the scenes, but they never work as well as a Google CSE embedded or plugged into a site.

As for advocating for CSE in the classroom, this is something I push for in the presentations I’ve done on search. I propose that teachers need to become better at search so they can model and train their students to be effective at sourcing and analyzing information. I see a google CSE as a perfect way to achieve this.

I have come up with a workflow for CSE if you are hosting one on your own site. This is the best way to achieve this as you can link it with Analytics to see the keywords your students are using. This allows you to provide a feedback and/or remediation on keyword selection to improve search results. http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_bell/4355361906/

so yeah, blah blah blah. :)