Relevanssi – A Better Search

Description

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. For more information about Premium, see Relevanssi.com.

Do note that using Relevanssi may require large amounts (hundreds of megabytes) of database space (for a reasonable estimate, multiply the size of your wp_posts database table by three). If your hosting setup has a limited amount of space for database tables, using Relevanssi may cause problems. In those cases use of Relevanssi cannot be recommended.

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.
  • Multisite friendly.
  • bbPress support.
  • Gutenberg friendly.

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.
  • Support for WPML multi-language plugin and Polylang.
  • Support for s2member membership plugin, Members, Groups, Simple Membership and other membership plugins.
  • 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.

Premium features (only in Relevanssi Premium)

  • Indexing attachment content (PDF, Office, Open Office).
  • Improved spelling correction in “Did you mean?” suggestions.
  • Searching across multiple sites in the same multisite installation.
  • 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).
  • Export and import settings.
  • WP CLI commands.
  • Related posts.
  • Redirects for searches.

Thanks

  • Cristian Damm for tag indexing, comment indexing, post/page exclusion and general helpfulness.
  • Marcus Dalgren for UTF-8 fixing.
  • Warren Tape for 2.5.5 fixes.
  • Mohib Ebrahim for relentless bug hunting.
  • John Calahan for extensive 4.0 beta testing.

Screenshots

  • Overview page
  • Indexing settings
  • Searching settings
  • Logging settings
  • Excerpts and highlights
  • Synonym settings
  • Stopword settings

Installation

  1. Install the plugin from the WordPress plugin screen.
  2. Activate the plugin.
  3. Go to the plugin settings page and build the index following the instructions there.
  4. That’s it!

Relevanssi uses the standard search form and doesn’t usually need any changes in the search results template.

If the search does not bring any results, your theme probably has a query_posts() call in the search results template. That throws Relevanssi off. For more information, see The most important Relevanssi debugging trick.

Uninstalling

To uninstall the plugin remove the plugin using the normal WordPress plugin management tools (from the Plugins page, first Deactivate, then Delete). If you remove the plugin files manually, the database tables and options will remain.

FAQ

Knowledge Base

You can find solutions and answers at the Relevanssi Knowledge Base.

Contextual help

Answers to many common problems can be found from the contextual menu. Just click “Help” in the top right corner of your WordPress admin dashboard on the Relevanssi settings page.

Relevanssi doesn’t work

If you the results don’t change after installing and activating Relevanssi, the most likely reason is that you have a call to query_posts() on your search results template. This confuses Relevanssi. Try removing the query_posts() call and see what happens.

Searching for words with ampersands or hyphens doesn’t work

Please read Words with punctuation can’t be found. This is a Relevanssi feature, but you can fix it from Relevanssi indexing settings.

Where are the user search logs?

See the top of the admin menu. There’s ‘User searches’.

Displaying the relevance score

Relevanssi stores the relevance score it uses to sort results in the $post variable. Just add something like

echo $post->relevance_score

to your search results template inside a PHP code block to display the relevance score.

Did you mean? suggestions

Relevanssi offers Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions. See “Did you mean” suggestions in the Knowledge Base for more details.

What is tf * idf weighing?

It’s the basic weighing scheme used in information retrieval. Tf stands for term frequency while idf is inverted document frequency. Term frequency is simply the number of times the term appears in a document, while document frequency is the number of documents in the database where the term appears.

Thus, the weight of the word for a document increases the more often it appears in the document and the less often it appears in other documents.

What are stop words?

Each document database is full of useless words. All the little words that appear in just about every document are completely useless for information retrieval purposes. Basically, their inverted document frequency is really low, so they never have much power in matching. Also, removing those words helps to make the index smaller and searching faster.

Reviews

October 24, 2024
I had a pleasure of using this plugin for some time and it was great. Fantastic functionality and as I recently found it also has fantastic support from plugin authors (Mikko specifically). I hope I can go for a premium version of the plugin for my future project.
July 11, 2024
Beaucoup d’options de configuration et assez simple à utiliser
April 10, 2024
I used Relevanssi for maybe 5 years and it’s one of the first plugins I add to any WP install. Personal customization is spot on, so that you get the output as you wish to convey it to your site. The depth of categorisation scans is beyond impressive and personally I see no effect on load time anywhere. Scans are super fast as are searches.. I have also added the Ajax pop-up plugin that saves users and servers a page load and takes you straight to that particular page required. The whole package is a killer engine. So much so it makes me wonder it’s not THE search engine in WP. I have only needed support once in my life when wp 6.5 launched. The fix from Mikko was immediate and very friendly, helpfull and competent. I operate in TT4 (Block themes), that these “years” transition to work smooth and stable. Relevanssi is maybe the one plugin that never caused any issues. It runs flawlessly in WP and also Woocommerce and even my multi vendor art fair I currently run at svalinnart.com. Feel free to test Relevanssi live there, if you so wish. Thx Mikko for this. It’s very appreciated on a daily basis!
March 11, 2024
I wanted to add captions in search results. This worked a treat, with minimum effort.
March 10, 2024
I have been using Relevanssi for several years for a number of websites and am very satisfied. It replaces the built-in WordPress search and complements it with many additional functions.
Read all 388 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Relevanssi – A Better Search” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Relevanssi – A Better Search” has been translated into 14 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Relevanssi – A Better Search” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

4.23.1

  • Security fix: Prevent an XSS attack by a malicious contributor.

4.23.0

  • New feature: New filter hook relevanssi_forbidden_post_types filters the list of post types excluded from Relevanssi indexing.
  • New feature: New filter hook relevanssi_forbidden_taxonomies filters the list of taxonomies excluded from Relevanssi indexing.
  • New feature: New filter hook relevanssi_show_password_protected controls whether password protected posts are shown in the search results.
  • New feature: Support for post_mime_type query parameter.
  • New feature: Relevanssi settings tabs have more CSS ids to help hide individual settings.
  • Changed behaviour: Password protected posts are excluded from the search results by default to protect their contents.
  • Minor fix: In rare cases, the search results would not be in relevance order if the throttle wasn’t used.
  • Minor fix: The settings tab query parameter was renamed to avoid collisions with other plugins.
  • Minor fix: User searches page now uses wp_print_inline_script_tag().

4.22.2

  • Security fix: Prevent CSV injection attack in log export.
  • Security fix: Restrict access to doc count updates.
  • Minor fix: Product variations check the parent product for access restrictions, to avoid situations where variations of a draft product appear in the results.
  • Minor fix: Improved TablePress compatibility.
  • Minor fix: Added error handling to the Ninja Table compatibility code.