Wordpress, an extremely popular blogging software, currently has close to 4 million installations across the internet. Its ease of use and fexibility has made it popular choice not only as blog software, but as the underlying engine for news websites, online magazines, and general purpose web sites as well.

Considering the amount of content a news site or magazine can have, it's obvious how critically important a good, fast search over a website can be. Most blogs, although, rely on using the default Wordpress keyword search: a simple, but sometimes ineffective way of performing a truly relevant search.

A new Wordpress plugin by Kenny Katzgrau, one of our developers at LTech, overcomes this obstacle with wpSearch, the first true search engine for a wordpress blog.

How wpSearch Works

There are quite a few search plugins for Wordpress. All of them try to improve the default wordpress search functionality in some way, but none of these plugins use Lucene, a high-performance, open-source search library. The Lucene library has been used by LTech before, most notably as a search solution for the job search engine EmployOn.

Once wpSearch is installed and active on a wordpress blog, a "search index" is built using the posts of that blog. wpSearch automatically hooks into the Wordpress search core, overriding the default wordpress search results with its own queried from the index. Instead of the search being slow and inaccurate, it typically executes in 30 to 60 milliseconds, returning results ordered by relevancy.

Where to Get wpSearch

The latest release of wpSearch is always available for download from the Wordpress repository at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpsearch/. Information about wpSearch and feature updates are available on Kenny's blog at CodeFury.

Before wpSearch: A search on a blog yields no results for the term 'downloads'.

After wpSearch: The same search as before. This time seven results are returned.