19 Useful Search Plugins For WordPress

Relevanssi – A Better Search

Relevanssi replaces the default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance. It also indexes comments and shortcode content.

Dave’s WordPress Live Search

Dave’s WordPress Live Search adds “live search” functionality to your WordPress site. As visitors type words into your WordPress site’s search box, the plugin continually queries WordPress, looking for search results that match what the user has typed so far.

The live search technique means that most people will find the results they are looking for before they finish typing their query, and it saves them the step of having to click a submit button to get their search results.

This functionality requires Javascript, but the search box still works normally if Javascript is not available.

Search Everything

Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search, options included:

• Search Highlighting
• Search Every Page
• Search Every Tag
• Search Custom Taxonomies ( new )
• Search Every Category
• Search non-password protected pages only
• Search Every Comment
• Search only approved comments
• Search Every Draft
• Search Every Excerpt
• Search Every Attachment (post type)
• Search Every Custom Field (metadata)
• Exclude Posts from search
• Exclude Categories from search

Search Unleashed

Advanced WordPress search with wildcards, highlighting, log, and ability to search all post data. Now with Lucene!

Google Custom Search Plugin

– Replaces all default WordPress search forms to point to Google Custom Search (thanks to a new hook in WordPress 2.7)
– Adds a new search page on your blog at /search/
– Converts the default /?s= URL to a search engine friendly /search/ URL
– Allows you to make money off clickthroughs on Google ads in the search results

Search Light

Search Light adds a nice Find-As-You-Type Ajax dropdown-interface for the standard WordPress search. Just install the plugin and start typing into the default WordPress search input field. You will get instant results ordered by articles and pages in an elegant and easy to use way.

Search Regex

Search Regex adds a powerful set of search and replace functions to WordPress. These go beyond the standard searching capabilities, and allow you to search and replace almost any data stored on your site. In addition to simple searches you have the full power of PHP’s regular expressions at your disposal.

The driving force behind this plugin is to aid in website migration and upgrading. If you’ve ever done either of these then you know the pain of having to go back through all your data, changing URL paths and fixing things. With this plugin you can reduce this work to a search and replace pattern and the job is finished in seconds.

WP Custom Fields Search

This is a search plugin for wordpress, designed to filter posts in a more structured way than the default wordpress search. Specifically it allows multiple form inputs to be configured to search different aspects of a post, i.e. one term could search the post content, one the post title and one could search a custom field associated with the post.

Better Search

• Search for posts contextually with results sorted by relevance
• Automatically replaces your default WordPress search with Better Search results
• Display a list of popular search terms (daily and overall) on your blog in the form of a heatmap
• Choose between WordPress search and Better Search (coming soon)
• Support for a template file for perfect integration into your blog template
• Clean uninstall if you choose to delete the plugin from within WP-Admin
• Works with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache

Sphinx Search

Sphinx Search is a plugin that uses the Search API plugin and Sphinx as a backend for searching. It searches comments, posts, and pages and also allow

Quick Search

Quick Search add AJAX Search to your site sorting results by Posts, Page and Comments. You can easly customize the popup menu style by modifying the file quick-search.css. You can find some option through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

Advanced Category Excluder

This plugin was born because there was a no other real alternative to enable content sparationd and some CMS like functionalities in WordPress. The main goal was, to enhance WordPress’s functionalities, to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog.

Today, ACE can override your search results, your RSS feed listing, your category listing, your recent post, and recent post widgets and also your entry page, or even hide whole categories of posts from web crawlers if you want to. This is great, for SEO reasons, for content separation, for grouping information, and handle them as real sub pages.

Customizable Search Widget

Adds a Customizable Search Widget to give you more control over how the search box looks on your sidebar.

Enhanced Search Box

This is a super simple WordPress plugin that simply adds some nice un-obtrusive Javascript functionality to the basic search box. This works out-of-the-box on a WordPress search box once activated and gives you the ability to control the default search text from the admin panel.

Enhanced Search box is built using jQuery and includes jQuery 1.3.2 from the Google AJAX Libraries API. In the admin panel you are given the option to not include jQuery, if you are already including a similar version (Enhanced search works from at least jQuery 1.2.6 and up) or if you are already using a plugin that is including jQuery.

• Allows control over the default search box text from the WordPress Admin
• Clears the default search text when the search box is focused
• Does not clear user-created search text
• Replaces the default search text when the search box is unfocused if no new text has been added

WP Search

WPSearch 2 is the missing site search for your WordPress installation. Install this plugin if you need a fast, relevant, google-like search.

Better Search

Replace the default WordPress search with a contextual search. Search results are sorted by relevancy.

Category Search

Category Search adds the option to display category names in search results. Useful when you have a lot of categories.

Autocompleter

Adding auto complete functionality to the blog search input field. The values provided are the tags and categories used in the blog.