Hi Jeffro,

Thanks for review and feedback about our plugin and service, we are still far behind to offer best search experience to our users however we are on the move.

Let me clarify below phrase;

"A: Plugin simply searches at searchbox and executes get requests to mysql with returned ids. Hope it is clear, let me know if you have more questions."

Plugin currently intercepts search requests done to database (typical like query) and executes a search request on SearchBox (elasticsearch). After search request is executed, server returns ids of found posts. Then we change that "like" query to select query with returned post ids.

The design concern on this behavior was to keep search page as is. So user will be able to change it's search back end with ease.

That design has some drawbacks which we want to address with next releases. For instance highlighting and suggestions (did you mean) not supported yet. To include these features we need to give user to choose either current mechanism or creating a new search page which will never interact with database after search is requested (Search results will be fetched from SearchBox directly).

Current source which we are working on has some improvements, most notable ones built in stemming configuration and auto complete. You can check it here https://github.com/searchbox-io/wp-elasticsearch.

Ferhat