Improved Searches on Kirkville with Relevanssi

I’ve recently installed the Relevanssi WordPress plug-in, by Mikko Saari, to improve search functionality here at Kirkville. WordPress’s searching, out of the box, pretty much sucks. It just returns a bunch of stories, with no context for the search terms, and no filtering of the results in order of search relevance. If you have tried searching here in the past, you probably didn’t find what you were looking for; or didn’t find what’s really there in all my posts and articles.

Relevanssi solves this problem by providing a relevance-based search engine, which sorts search results on a page with short excerpts and highlights your search terms. (These are options that can be tweaked in the plug-in’s settings. I chose to use 100-word excerpts and yellow text background for highlighting.) You’ll find that searching now is useful here. If you’re looking for specific books, music, iTunes features or iPod tweaks, try entering a couple of search terms in the box to the right and see what turns up. Thanks to Mikko for developing this plug-in; it’s very useful, and I think a lot of other WordPress users will want to try it out.