Relevanssi – A Better Search

Relevanssi 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.

4.23.1

• Security fix: Prevent an XSS attack by a malicious contributor.

4.23.0

• New feature: New filter hook relevanssi_forbidden_post_types filters the list of post types excluded from Relevanssi indexing.
• New feature: New filter hook relevanssi_forbidden_taxonomies filters the list of taxonomies excluded from Relevanssi indexing.
• New feature: New filter hook relevanssi_show_password_protected controls whether password protected posts are shown in the search results.
• New feature: Support for post_mime_type query parameter.
• New feature: Relevanssi settings tabs have more CSS ids to help hide individual settings.
• Changed behaviour: Password protected posts are excluded from the search results by default to protect their contents.
• Minor fix: In rare cases, the search results would not be in relevance order if the throttle wasn’t used.
• Minor fix: The settings tab query parameter was renamed to avoid collisions with other plugins.
• Minor fix: User searches page now uses wp_print_inline_script_tag().

4.22.2

• Security fix: Prevent CSV injection attack in log export.
• Security fix: Restrict access to doc count updates.
• Minor fix: Product variations check the parent product for access restrictions, to avoid situations where variations of a draft product appear in the results.
• Minor fix: Improved TablePress compatibility.
• Minor fix: Added error handling to the Ninja Table compatibility code.

1. Install the plugin from the WordPress plugin screen.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Go to the plugin settings page and build the index following the instructions there.
4. That’s it!

Relevanssi uses the standard search form and doesn’t usually need any changes in the search results template.

If the search does not bring any results, your theme probably has a query_posts() call in the search results template. That throws Relevanssi off. For more information, see The most important Relevanssi debugging trick.

Uninstalling

To uninstall the plugin remove the plugin using the normal WordPress plugin management tools (from the Plugins page, first Deactivate, then Delete). If you remove the plugin files manually, the database tables and options will remain.