Poor relevancy in search results

  • I’m a big fan of Relevanssi (the original full plugin) but this time I thought I’d try the light version. Our site is pretty simple. About 1000 posts. I just needed something that could handle apostrophes in the post title gracefully (for example, a search for “Jester’s Maze” brought up “not found” with the native WordPress search and we needed it to pull up the story with that title).

    This light plugin DID handle the apostrophe properly, however the overall relevancy of the search results was very poor. “Jester’s Maze” came up in the results, but not as the first result. In a search for “amber eyes”, I had to scroll several pages to find the story titled “Amber Eyes”. If the story title is an exact match with the search terms (not counting punctuation and capitalization), it should bring up that story FIRST.

    I had to uninstall this light version and install the full-fledged Relevanssi plugin to get the search results to behave properly. Disappointing, but I’m glad the bigger plugin is out there.

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  • Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    Unfortunately, the relevancy of the results is something I can’t control either. Relevanssi Light doesn’t do any of the searching itself, it just enables the full-text searching in your database. Thus the MySQL database itself is responsible for the results. Generally, it’s good, but when it isn’t, there’s little you can do about it.

    With Relevanssi, you do get full control over the results, and if there’s a problem, it can be fixed.

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