I have been maintaining a pretty extensive archive of blog posts reaching back to 2004, which in some cases contains outdated information, but in others, provide some great insight in some timeless concepts that are still relevant today.
But to really take advantage of a catalog with many hundred blog posts, a well working search function is crucial. The WordPress built-in search is pretty limiting, therefore I looked at some alternatives and came across two very interesting plug-ins.
It’s a pretty extensive real-time search extension which provides a listing of different results from different categories. It advertises a “Facebook-like theme”, which for me personally was rather a disadvantage. Thankfully the ability to apply themes with CSS and skinning images allows a more custom feeling.
If you want to give it a try, it’s turned on in the search field in the top right corner.
2) Relevanssi – A Better Search
After the instant live search, there is still a fallback to the default WordPress search functionality for more detailed results. Relevanssi not only provides custom indexing options, but also advanced search options like search terms with quotes or fuzzy matching.
And again, if you want to try out the combination of both, there are turned on on this blog. Happy searching.
