Search functions (widgets and built in)
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The search function in wordpress has always been sort of anemic, or perhaps it is better than we think, but we just don’t have any documentation on how to effectively use it. Many times you can search for exact phrases from posts and get no hits even though you are actually looking at the exact phrase in a post. Sometimes what you are looking for will returned in the results, but buried in a bunch of seemingly totally unrelated stuff and you have to pick your way through numerous other posts to find the one you are looking for.
There is also no clear cut description of what the site search function (widget or built-in search box) actually searches. Does it scan titles, categories, tags, content, does it search post as well as page content or just posts? An update with some explanation and clarification in the search widget support document would be a welcome thing. Also, what boolean thingies does it support or does it support any?
Knowing what it actually searches and how to use it would be a big help.
Thanks in advance.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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~~thesacredpath Great move..:)
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When we search any thing with Search Widget or Built In search box, we get same results since both does up with an url like http://wpgaurav.wordpress.com/?s=math (I’m searching math in my blog).
I did many searches and found following features of search widget:- It includes all posts and pages containing that key-word.
- It also includes results from the post in which the ‘keyword’ is a part of another word. For example: Searching ‘math’ also results posts having mathematics, mathematician etc.
- It’s not theme dependent.
- Results do not include tags and categories. (tags are found at /tag/keyword/ and categories at /category/keyword/
- It does not include comments.
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The thing is though it doesn’t consistently work the way it should. I’ve also never had it return a page in a search result and about a year ago I did a bunch of testing on it on a friend’s site and searching for a number of key phrases in one of the pages never returned that page as a result.
It needs some serious lovin’ from the developers (IMO). It is way behind the times.
I loath when I have to do a search on Panos’ site for one of the great posts he has done since I can never seem to get the search term correct so that I don’t have to sift through 25 or 30 posts. If I want to find something on Panos’ site, I’ve resorted to using Google since the same search term gets me the post I’m looking for usually in the top 3 results.
I’m not saying the wordpress widget/built-in search here has to be as robust as Google, but I would sure like to see some improvement.
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+1 from me. We really need some improvements in it. It would be good if the WordPress.com search results (at your site) also include Google Search results.
Have you any other ideas? -
I’ve had the same problem. I’ve tried to “search this site” (my own) for previous posts concerning a specific topic, and the answers come back “0” even though I’ve typed in the exact words, in the same order which were included in the post headline, the categories, and the tags.
This is the only area in which blogger performed better than WordPress, and I do hope that WordPress will take whatever steps it can to improve the search functions.
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@desertbacon: Precisely. Post titles are not indexed, and tags/categories have to be prefixed with “tags:”
http://en.support.wordpress.com/wordpresscom-search/If you have any concerns about this, feel free to write to WordPress.com starting August 15: http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/
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It would also be nice if the Search WordPress Widget could look at the file names of the published images (of a gallery, e.g.). So that if you have a gallery with published images, the image can be displayed directly based on its name (or description, etc.).
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I will contact WordPress on this after Aug 15th, unless somebody knows how to solve this…
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