Rankology Ajax Live Search

Rankology Ajax Live Search upgrades the native WordPress search experience with fast, modern AJAX results, a dedicated relevance index, and a polished admin workflow. Visitors get instant suggestions as they type; site owners get visibility into what people search for and what they cannot find.

Built for production sites and WordPress.org plugin directory standards, Rankology is suitable for blogs, business websites, membership portals, and WooCommerce stores that need accurate, configurable search without slowing down the front end.

Search experience

• Live AJAX search — Results update as visitors type, with configurable debounce and keyboard-friendly navigation.
• Autocomplete suggestions — Surface popular, recent, and Google-style query suggestions before a full search runs.
• Multiple result layouts — Vertical dropdown, horizontal grid, polaroid tiles, and isotopic masonry.
• Visual polish — Thumbnails, keyword highlighting, smart excerpts, and built-in color themes.
• Single-result redirect — Optionally send visitors straight to the destination when only one match is found.
• Modal and voice search — Open search in a modal overlay and accept voice input where supported by the browser.
• Responsive UI — Mobile-friendly search forms and result panels.

Relevance and performance

• Custom search index — Dedicated indexing engine with BM25-style relevance scoring and field weights.
• Configurable content scope — Include posts, pages, products, custom post types, taxonomies, and custom fields.
• File indexing — Optional extraction of text from attached PDF, DOCX, and TXT files.
• WooCommerce ready — Search products, show prices, and weight SKU and catalog fields.
• Caching and rate limiting — Protect the public search endpoint from abuse while keeping responses fast.

Filters and discovery

• Live filters — Taxonomy, price range, and custom field filters with AJAX updates.
• Filter builder — Configure filter panels from the admin without writing code.
• SERP templates — Customize the on-site search results page layout, sorting, featured results, and filter sidebar.

Search widgets

Create unlimited Search Widgets — each with its own post types, layout, theme, behavior, and filter settings.

• Gutenberg block (rankajlisrh/search)
• Shortcode: [rankajlisrh]
• Classic widget
• Per-widget shortcodes for precise placement in headers, sidebars, and landing pages

Analytics and optimization

Understand how search performs on your site:

• Overview dashboard — Top queries, trending terms, and zero-result searches.
• Search logs — Detailed query history with results count, click tracking, device, and locale.
• Query redirect rules — Send specific searches to a chosen URL by pattern, role, or language.
• Exports — Download analytics as CSV or a printable PDF report.
• Scheduled email reports — Optional periodic analytics summaries sent via WordPress wp_mail().

Developer-friendly

• REST API — Headless and custom integration support under the rankajlisrh/v1 namespace.
• WP-CLI commands — Rebuild and inspect the index from the command line (wp rankajlisrh index …).
• Multisite aware — Network-level settings synchronization for WordPress multisite installs.
• Migration tools — Import settings from Ajax Search Pro and SearchWP.

Admin

A unified Rankology menu in wp-admin includes Overview, Configuration, Search Widgets, Analytics & Logs, and Query Redirect Rules — designed for clarity on both small blogs and larger editorial teams.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.2 or later
• PHP 8.1 or later
• MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3+

Credits

Bundled libraries

• Composer ClassLoader — MIT License. Copyright (c) Nils Adermann, Jordi Boggiano. Used for PSR-4 autoloading in vendor/composer/.

WordPress core dependencies (not bundled)

• jQuery — Admin and frontend UI interactions.
• WordPress packages (wp-element, wp-components, wp-i18n) — Admin dashboard hub UI.

Optional Composer libraries (not bundled)

• smalot/pdfparser — LGPL-3.0. Optional. PDF attachment text extraction.
• phpoffice/phpword — LGPL-3.0. Optional. DOCX attachment text extraction.

TXT file extraction uses native PHP only.

Compatible plugins (not bundled)

• WooCommerce — Product search, prices, SKU weighting, and variation indexing.
• WPML — Per-language indexing and search filtering.
• Polylang — Per-language indexing and search filtering.
• Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) — Custom field indexing and filter UI.
• WP Mail Logging — View scheduled analytics email content from the admin.

Privacy Policy

This plugin stores search analytics, index data, and plugin settings in your WordPress database. It does not phone home to Rankology servers.

Google Suggest API

When Google-style autocomplete is enabled in Rankology → Configuration → Autocomplete, the plugin may send partial search terms from your site to Google’s public suggestion service at https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search.

• What is sent: The current partial search query and optional language or region parameters.
• When it is sent: Only while autocomplete is enabled and local suggestion sources do not already fill the suggestion list.
• Why it is sent: To retrieve Google-style query suggestions for visitors.
• Caching: Responses are cached locally with WordPress transients to reduce repeat requests.
• Third-party policy: Review Google’s Privacy Policy for how Google handles data sent to its services.

Email reports

If you enable scheduled analytics email reports, message content is sent through your WordPress site’s configured mail transport (wp_mail()). Rankology does not provide or operate that mail service.

Voice search

When voice search is used in supported browsers, speech recognition is handled by the visitor’s browser. Rankology does not record or transmit audio to its own servers.