If you’re simply looking to instantly enhance the relevance of searches on your WordPress powered website, you can rest assured that SearchWP will do that for you without any extra configuration steps. On the other hand, if you’d like to fine-tune the weights SearchWP uses to rank results, you can do that in just a few minutes. SearchWP was built in response to WordPress conventions; with the knowledge that keywords are likely to show up in any number of places, each of which may have varying importance post type to post type. That’s why you’re able to define keyword weights for everything individually in SearchWP.
If a post type does not support one of the above, it will be omitted from the settings page and search algorithm entirely. You also have the option to exclude post IDs, enter comma separated IDs you’d like to exclude from search results.
Note: Custom Field support was integrated in such a way to best work with existing WordPress installations. For example, SearchWP doesn’t care what type of data is stored in your Custom Field in the database itself. If you’ve stored serialized or JSON encoded data, SearchWP will decode it before indexing the content, so even array values and object properties will be indexed.
This is a bit of a unique feature to SearchWP, but once explained it might prove to be immensely useful. There are certain circumstances where you might use a custom post type to house any number of entries, but depending on the site design they might not have (or need) permalinks. In this case the CPT content would be pulled into a parent Page, which in fact deserves the ‘credit’ for search results that point to the CPT entry. With SearchWP you can attribute that keyword weight to the Page displaying your content, and credit will be given to the Page itself as opposed to the single CPT entry.
Retrieving relevant results is important, but language is a very complex thing. Keyword stemming is a technique that broadens search queries to include various forms of each term. For example, with stemming enabled searches for “fishing”, “fished”, “fisher”, and “fish” would all yield the same result set, whereas with stemming disabled the algorithm would look only for the exact terms in the query. Some people prefer more strict results while others feel keyword stemming provides more relevance, it comes down to the content on your site and what people are searching for.
Once the index has been reset you will be presented with a link to rebuild the index.