[Plugin: Relevanssi] Phrase not coming up high enough

From the basic options, make sure “Default operator” is “AND”. That way the documents that don’t have word “Mitchell” won’t even appear in the listings.

If you don’t like that, you could make the title boost value lower. All the “David” entries are coming first because they have the word “David” in the title and the words in titles get a bit of a boost.

Thanks for the quick reply!

I tried making the “Default operator” “AND” and I now get zero results for David Mitchell. Looking at the source there is no indication output so I wonder if this is a bug?

There’s something odd there, as phrase search “david mitchell” finds nothing as well. For some reason the document isn’t indexed properly. It even looks a bit odd – even though “David Mitchell” is in a list, there’s no bullet in front of it.

I’d suggest reindexing. You could also try to juggle the words a bit, move the phrase “David Mitchell” somewhere else in the document and see what happens.

This is fairly basic stuff, so there shouldn’t be any major bugs involved, instead it’s likely something small and strange.

The same thing happens to me as well… two words… ‘AND’ operator… but the ones that have the exact words next to each other don’t appear at the top. And those words don’t even exist in the titles.

And I was experimenting with the above site (https://theorwellprize.co.uk/)… I searched for ‘David Runciman’ and it didn’t even appear in the first page….???

I’m sorry… my mistake… but it did came at the top for me. I didn’t notice it because the excerpts snippet were showing the section that doesn’t have the words next to each other, which were higher up in the paragraphs. It would be good to be able to show the sections with the best results, though…

Nevertheless, the site above still provides the same problem when searching…

Sorry for the multiple post within a short period of time, but I’m experimenting the plug-in and reporting as I go…

Anyway, again the result didn’t show good relevancy. Experimented on two posts. Searched with two words. The post that contains the two words came below the other one which only have one of the words. I had checked and, yes, the latter post only has one of the words. Shouldn’t the former one be on top? Played around with the settings but still didn’t produce relevant results.

By the way, wpSearch plug-in seems to have a new version (https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wpsearch/). Of course, it’s lacking in a lot of ways, but the search results seems to be good. Maybe you can use the code again for the search functionality and implement it in yours maybe? Just a suggestion.

Cheers!

Relevanssi is using very basic weighting scheme, which might be backfiring here. If you want professional level search engine, use wpSearch.

There’s something odd going on the Orwell Prize site, I haven’t had similar problems on my sites.

If there’s something odd in the order of search results, make the plugin display the relevancy scores and see what kind of scores the results get.

wpSearch may be good.. but it’s lacking in terms of customization. I enjoyed many features of Relevanssi such as the post type filter, the excerpt snippet, and the hilite of results.

Thanks for the plugin, though! Keep it up! ??

The SERP now shows score and terms, I’ve also created a test page with the title David Mitchell and this is coming up at the top.

See:
https://theorwellprize.co.uk/?s=David+Mitchell

However this doesn’t fix the problem with David Mitchell not coming up high enough where he appeared as on the panel at an event. The event section has been created using Magic Fields (as a post type in the category events), so might this be the reason? I know Magic Fields doesn’t create custom post types yet, it seems to add slick write panels, making it easy for clients to add extra data.

Appreciate the support and any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Magic Fields, eh… That’s it, then, I guess. I don’t know a bit about how Magic Fields works, but probably the content is added to the page after Relevanssi indexes it, and thus the content won’t get indexed. Relevanssi does expand short codes, but there have been similar problems with Sniplets.

Looks like I’ll have to add some Magic Fields compatibility, then.

That would be great! Hopefully that’s the issue. What’s interesting is the text is within the main edit panel which should work as either a page or a post, but perhaps it’s classified uniquely as hence isn’t weighted as importantly.

Ah, Magic Fields is a fork of Flutter. Flutter I know (and dislike), and as far as I know it doesn’t conflict at all with Relevanssi – after all, the text is there in the body of the post.

Actually, now that you have the relevancy scores displayed, it’s starting to clear up. As you can see, the test page scores highly for David Mitchell and comes up first as it should. The Oxford debate ranks on the page two, because most items before it have “David” in the title and that makes them rank higher. Changing title boost closer to 1 might raise it higher, but it might still be behind some of those entries with word “david” many times in them (“mitchell” is rarer and more valuable than “david”, so the entry should at least get on the first page).

There’s no extra score awarded for having both words close to each other. That’s something that would be clever and useful, give a boost for words appearing with n words of each other and so – maybe I’ll investigate that in the future. It’s just more complicated than just counting matches and I’m already worried Relevanssi isn’t as fast and well-optimized as it should be

I think the best solution here would be to use AND operator, which makes sure both words appear. There’s the problem of having no results when using AND – that sure sounds like a bug. Could you please try moving “David Mitchell” in the Oxford event entry so the words aren’t right after the bullet point and then try searching with “AND” operator? I’d like to see if that has any effect.

If that continues to be a problem, you could try adjusting the title boost to, say, 2.

By the way, every time I visit your site, I end up clicking “Last” in the search results when I actually want to go the next page. I’d recommend some UI changes there… Maybe give the Next/Last buttons names instead of just arrows?

Thanks for all your help on this – I ended up using Google Custom Search.