Awesome Motive, the company behind MonsterInsights, OptinMonster, WPForms, and several other popular products, has acquired SearchWP, a commercial plugin that enhances WordPress’ search functionality. No changes have been announced for the plugin and Awesome Motive CEO Syed Balkhi says it will be “business as usual” for current customers. “We have built a lot of internal…
Google is rolling out an update to mobile search results that includes website branding. The new design displays a website’s name and icon at the top of the listing so users can easily scan results. If the result is an ad, it will be indicated in bold next to the website’s address. Below is a…
During the past few days, I’ve been experimenting with a variety of WordPress plugins that specifically deal with the archiving of posts. Most allow archives to be generated via short code on a page while others are simply widgets with different configuration options. Some of the plugins I tested displayed every post ever published which…
A few days ago, we mentioned an article by WPShout.com that explained how to find live examples of WordPress powered sites using themes. Today, I wanted to share a new site that’s been launched called WordPress by Example. It’s a WordPress specific search engine designed to showcase sites using themes related to search terms such…
On this weeks edition of WordPress Weekly, Swiftype will be our special guest. I reviewed their plugin/service back in May. We plan on talking about why the search in WordPress is not as good as it should be, what makes search hard, the performance impacts of search and of course, the benefits of using search…
In my journey of locating a better WordPress search alternative, it was suggested that I give Swiftype a try. Swiftype is another search service that offloads the searching process to their servers instead of having to rely on the database to give results. Unlike my struggles with the ElasticSearch Plugin, the folks over at Swiftype…
On my recent article discussing the search functionality within WordPress, a few folks in the comments suggested alternatives to try. One of those was the ElasticSearch plugin. My main complaint in that article was that there was not an easy way to tap into the Elastic Search service without having access to a dedicated server…
On May 6th, the WordPress VIP team blog announced a new VIP service they’ll be offering centered around search. While at first it may be surprising that the default search in WordPress was not used in their latest project, the fact is, WordPress search in its current state can not perform complex search queries without…
When performing a search on the Codex, you’re presented with a slew of search results. However, not all of those results are within the Codex. The search portion of the Codex is powered by a Google custom search box which not only presents results from within the Codex, but from across WordPress.org as well, mainly…
The default search engine in WordPress has sucked for a number of years. So much so that people end up replacing it with a custom Google search box. However, there is a plugin that has been gaining steam in recent months called Relevanssi that is trying to solve most of the problems the default search…
Chris Liversidge of Search Engine Land gives an explanation as to why WordPress is not his platform of choice when it comes to multinational search. I was with him up until the point he discussed security where he states that WordPress is plagued by frequent security updates. This is not true. Security within WordPress has…
What was your inspiration for creating WPSeek? The first idea of wpseek wasn’t actually to create a public search engine for WordPress developers. When I finished creating a little Firefox add-on called “WordPress Helper” [1] some years back, I was using wpseek as a kind of search result page for requests made with the “WordPress…
Jacob Gube of SixRevisions.com has published his take on ten features that are missing from the core of WordPress. According to Jacob, these features should be adopted into the core of WordPress for the benefit of all. I agree with some of his reasoning on moving features into core but it’s a mindset that I’ve…
Beeline is a service whose goal is to predict the search patterns of users and present those results within the posts of your WordPress powered site. Unfortunately, I have no idea if it’s working or not. If I could review Beeline in one word, it would be LOST. The journey begins by visiting the Beeline…
Are you fed up with the way the default search works on your WordPress powered site? You’re not alone. As was discussed in the forum thread I just linked to, Google Custom Search was brought up as a way to substitute the WordPress search engine with one powered by Google. I thought about adding Google…