Quite better search

  • Edited:
    Well, despite some limitations, it does its job. I’m still trying out to find the best setup. It’s a lot better than native wordpress search, but you have to experiment the config options to find out what is the best for your site and how to work around the limitations due to each language (mine is portuguese). It’s worth trying. Hope I’ll come back soon with a 5 star

    I was trying out this plugin and it does has some intelligence, like finding a product in woocommerce even if the user misspell one of the terms in search. But it has huge limitations, like not finding all products with terms in plural. For example, if user searchs for “horse”, all the products which has “horses” in the title and description won’t show up in results. How come the plugin will miss such a simple thing? This is why I don’t recommend it at all for e-commerce sites

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    Despite any apparent intelligence, Relevanssi is actually a dumb text matcher. It doesn’t know anything about language.

    However, if you don’t find posts with “horses” when you search for “horse”, that’s just a question of configuring the plugin correctly. Set the “Keyword matching” setting to “Partial words”, and you’ll get those results as expected. Please give it a go! Supporting partial matching like this is a basic feature in any decent search plugin.

    Also, handling plurals is a problem that appears easier than it is. Especially when you need to do it in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Swedish, etc. Relevanssi Premium gives you access to a proper Snowball Stemmer, which handles plurals and more for many languages. That solves this problem thoroughly and efficiently.

    If you want brutally simple plural handling for English, you can add this snippet to your site:

    add_filter( 'relevanssi_modify_wp_query', function( $query ) {
    if ( str_ends_with( $query->query_vars['s'], 's' ) ) {
        $query->query_vars['s'] = substr( $query->query_vars['s'], 0, -1 );
    }
    return $query;
} );

    This will make “horses” find any post with “horse” in it.

    We have hundreds of happy paying e-commerce customers, so I feel safe assuring you Relevanssi has all the features a small e-commerce site needs. For large e-commerce sites, I recommend other search solutions (but those are not free and are much more expensive than Relevanssi Premium).

    Hopefully, this’ll make you reconsider using Relevanssi (and maybe those review stars as well). I’m obviously biased, but I think it is the best free search solution for WordPress. If you have further problems setting up Relevanssi to work the way you want, feel free to post your question to the support forums. I answer questions many times a day, so you won’t have to wait long for an answer.

    Thread Starter Silvana Borges

    (@silvanaborges)

    Yeah, you’re right, partial words will find some simple plurals, although it will also bring, so to speak, less relevant results. But I’ll give it a try.

    I apologize for the only 2 stars review before. I realize handling search in wordpress is a lot more complicated than it seems and I don’t doubt Relevanssi is the best solution, despite all the complexity involved in wordpress search

    Thank you for the thoughtful answer

    Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    The Snowball Stemmer supports Portuguese, so that’s there. But yes, it will make the search less precise. That’s always the trade-off: you must choose whether you want precise results or more results. There’s no one correct answer; it depends on the use case.

    By default, the partial matching matches the beginnings and the ends of the words. We just modified it to one client to only match the beginnings of the words, as they found the default version too fuzzy. That’s one of the better sides of Relevanssi: there’s a ton of room for customization.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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