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Relevanssi replaces the standard WordPress search with a better search engine, with lots of features and configurable options. You'll get better results, better presentation of results - your users will thank you.

This is the free version of Relevanssi. There's also Relevanssi Premium, which has added features, including Multisite support. This free version does not work properly on Multisite. For more information about Premium, see Relevanssi.com.

Key features

• Search results sorted in the order of relevance, not by date.
• Fuzzy matching: match partial words, if complete words don't match.
• Find documents matching either just one search term (OR query) or require all words to appear (AND query).
• Search for phrases with quotes, for example "search phrase".
• Create custom excerpts that show where the hit was made, with the search terms highlighted.
• Highlight search terms in the documents when user clicks through search results.
• Search comments, tags, categories and custom fields.

Advanced features

• Adjust the weighting for titles, tags and comments.
• Log queries, show most popular queries and recent queries with no hits.
• Restrict searches to categories and tags using a hidden variable or plugin settings.
• Index custom post types and custom taxonomies.
• Index the contents of shortcodes.
• Google-style "Did you mean?" suggestions based on successful user searches.
• Automatic support for WPML multi-language plugin.
• Automatic support for s2member membership plugin.
• Advanced filtering to help hacking the search results the way you want.
• Search result throttling to improve performance on large databases.
• Disable indexing of post content and post titles with a simple filter hook.

Relevanssi is available in two versions, regular and Premium. Regular Relevanssi is and will remain free to download and use. Relevanssi Premium comes with a cost, but will get all the new features. Standard Relevanssi will be updated to fix bugs, but new features will mostly appear in Premium. Also, support for standard Relevanssi depends very much on my mood and available time. Premium pricing includes support.

Premium features (only in Relevanssi Premium)

• Improved spelling correction in "Did you mean?" suggestions.
• Multisite support.
• Search and index user profiles.
• Search and index taxonomy term pages (categories, tags, custom taxonomies).
• Search and index arbitrary columns in wp_posts MySQL table.
• Assign weights to any post types and taxonomies.
• Assign extra weight to new posts.
• Let the user choose between AND and OR searches, use + and - operator (AND and NOT).
• Highlighting search terms for visitors from external search engines.
• Export and import settings.

Relevanssi in Facebook

You can find Relevanssi in Facebook. Become a fan to follow the development of the plugin, I'll post updates on bugs, new features and new versions to the Facebook page.

Other search plugins

Relevanssi owes a lot to wpSearch by Kenny Katzgrau. Relevanssi was built to replace wpSearch, when it started to fail.

Search Unleashed is a popular search plugin, but it hasn't been updated since 2010. Relevanssi is in active development and does what Search Unleashed does.