Bonus Weight on Title Length

Actually after thinking about this for a moment I guess the better option is to reduce the weight of long titles rather than increase the weight of short ones. This ensures that any relevant but long titles get pushed down, while non-relevant short titles don’t get an over bonus.

Still not sure where to begin implementing it but the reduction of weight on length would be more efficient.

relevanssi_match filter is your friend. It gets applied to the post in the weighting process. The first parameter is the match object. You can find the exact details in lib/search.php, but the key things here are the post ID, which is in $match->doc, and the weight, which is in $match->weight. Now, get the title from the ID, and if it’s too long, adjust $match->weight.

The filter needs to return the $match object.

Posting this here in the hopes it will help others – I think this is right, still in the process of testing:

add_filter('relevanssi_match', 'lower_title_weight');

function lower_title_weight($match) {
	$post_type = get_post_meta($match->doc);
	if (strlen($title) >= 15) {
		$match->weight = $match->weight / 2;
	}
	return $match;
}

Or not – that seems to have yielded terrible results. Back to the drawing board.

That’s not going to work, as you haven’t defined $title anywhere. Instead of $post_type = get_post_meta($match->doc);, you probably want $title = get_the_title($match->doc);.

add_filter('relevanssi_match', 'lower_title_weight');

function lower_title_weight($match) {
	$title = get_the_title($match->doc);
	if (strlen($title) >= 15) {
		$match->weight = $match->weight / 2;
	}
	return $match;
}

Awesome thanks for that Mikko – the new code I am using is above and after testing it does indeed work!