Search is a bit part of any online presence. Most people focus on getting people to their site, but what happens after they are there? Does your blogs search perform as well as it should?

If you are using WordPress’ default search, then what you are getting is a pretty bad search experience. It seems that WordPress’ default search returns results based on date, not on relevance, which makes finding anything very difficult.

To make WordPress’ search much better, grab the Search Unleashed plugin.

Search Unleashed allows you to:

• Define what you want included in search results. IE: Pages, Comments, Posts, Authors, Tags
• Use search operators and wild cards.
• Replace category and tag archives with search results.
• Highlight matching terms on search result pages.
• Customize your type of search engine.
• See what users have been searching for.
• Search within categories.

The best part about the plugin is you just need to install and activate it. There is no need to edit your theme or worry about customizing anything. It just works.

Take your WordPress blog search to the next level with Search Unleashed. You, and your visitors, won’t be disappointed.

By default, WordPress is setup to search every post. What they don’t tell you is that doesn’t include pages. However, with the Search Everything plugin, you can search pages, posts and more.

No only will Search Everything allow you to include pages in your WordPress search, but also comments, drafts, attachments and custom meta fields. You get to choose what extra fields you want to include which is good as I have no idea why you’d want to include drafts or un-approved comments.

This is really handy for those that use WordPress as their website content management system. I’ve used WordPress not as a blogging platform, but as an easy content management source. Some sites have more pages than posts and searching proves problematic.

Even if you use WordPress for blogging, like most do, there is probably a good chance that you’ve created some pages. Maybe an about page, content, resources or one of many options. And, all those pages deserve to be part of the internal search.

By installing the Search Everything plugin, not only will the search box look though posts, but pages also and give your visitors better results.

[tags]search-everything,search[/tags]

Ask.com has been hard at work improving their engine ever since they let Jeeves go. They have quite a few TV ads promoting it, but he coolest thing I’ve seen so far is a great, interactive demo on what’s new and how to use Ask.com. It’s all about spending less time searching and more time finding. http://searchtools.ask.com/

I think I’ll change my Firefox search box to Ask now to give it a go myself.

[tags]ask,search,jeeves[/tags]