Hello, William
most of the things you listed are already implemented, some of them in the development stage and some of them are achievable using code-based customizations (via wpfts_index_post hook, for example) and implementing search via WP_Query() with a custom set of parameters.
I try to say a couple of words for each feature.
>> a) type-ahead with no of matches found
The feature calling “Live Search” is in the development now and should be ready in a couple of weeks (in the free version too).
>> c) highlighting the search word is found document or notes even after opening the note..In the theme, it is highlighted only on search…On clicking the document, the search text should be automatically highlighted.
You can’t highlight words inside the PDF document, which is opened in the browser. However, you can highlight words at the HTML or WP post page, it’s not hard to do at all, but, ok, I think we can include this simple feature to the next version of WPFTS.
>> d) easy navigation with next, previous, goto exact match button as well as keyboard shortcuts once the result has been clicked or opened.
This function is completely under control of the frontend part of the website and should be implemented by the theme developer or by custom programming. This feature is very custom and required by almost nobody (you are the first who asked this in the latest 3 years!) and so this will not be implemented in WPFTS.
>> e) search only in titles or inside the content
This function is already implemented. You can play with “cluster weights” to completely remove title or content (or any other index cluster) from the relevance formula and thus control the search. “Cluster weights” values can be set as parameters for WP_Query(). Very simple.
>> f) search results in less than a second
Search speed mostly depends on your server power. You can not reach “less than a second” with a cheap shared hosting and half-billion documents/posts. The WPFTS search algorithm is fast by itself because it uses a highly optimized index approach. But with slow shared server it will work slowly anyway. There’s no magic.
>> also, multi-lingual search.. have huge text files in different languages…wanted to index as per the language and search in the respective index only…
It’s solvable by using different coefficients for different language “clusters”. For example, if you have one document with two different languages, you can put one language content to the cluster “post_content_english” and another content to “post_content_espaniol” and then apply different weights for those 2 clusters when searching. For example, if you need this document to be found by the English query only, you can set up the weight for the “post_content_espaniol” to 0. And thus this document will be found only by English query.
>> currently the plugin might search the entire site which is not required…
You can effectively disable some parts of the search index using WP_Query() parameters and cluster weights as described above.
>> search should be customizable…
The search is highly customizable with WPFTS. But the range of features potential users could need is so much, that’s why it’s impossible to enclose all them to the WPFTS Settings. Some PHP coding will be required anyway.
