OZY Smart Search

WordPress search matches raw substrings against post titles and content. It ignores custom fields, cannot rank by relevance, and gives up on a single typo. OZY Smart Search replaces it. Ranked results. Okapi BM25 scoring over a purpose-built index, with per-field weights. A title match outranks a passing mention in a paragraph. Typo tolerance. When an exact search comes up short, near-miss words are tried, scored below exact matches so a real hit always wins. Custom fields. Advanced Custom Fields, Secure Custom Fields, Meta Box, CMB2, Carbon Fields and core meta are detected automatically, including repeaters, groups and flexible content. WooCommerce. Products, variations, SKUs and attributes are indexed. Result cards show price, stock, rating and add-to-cart, and respect catalogue visibility. Optional semantic search. Add a key from one of the supported AI providers and results start matching by meaning, not just wording. Several providers have a free tier. Without a provider the plugin never contacts an external service. Design without CSS. Six presets and full control over colour, type, spacing, shape, shadow and motion, with a live preview. Works where you build. Native widgets for the block editor, Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, Beaver Builder, Oxygen, Bricks, Avada and Brizy. A shortcode covers everything else. Leave the default-search replacement on and your theme's existing search form starts using it with no template changes. Analytics that suggest fixes. See what visitors search for, what found nothing, and where they click — then get concrete suggestions: a page worth writing, a synonym worth adding, a field worth weighting higher. Everything is free There is no pro version, no feature lock, no trial and no upsell. This plugin is how people find OZY Solutions, and that is the whole model. Features

• Live AJAX search with debouncing and in-memory response caching
• BM25 relevance ranking with configurable per-field weights
• Fuzzy matching for typos
• Optional semantic search and AI reranking
• Multiple independent search engines per site
• Custom field indexing across six field plugins
• WooCommerce products, variations, SKUs and attributes
• Synonyms and stopwords, with CSV import
• Faceted filtering: post type, taxonomy, price, date, author, rating, stock
• Search results page with sorting, filter chips and pagination
• Search analytics with zero-result tracking and recommendations
• Voice search using the browser Speech Recognition API
• Recent and popular searches
• Full keyboard navigation and WCAG 2.1 AA support
• Dark mode, reduced motion and high contrast support
• Multisite, WPML and Polylang
• Cache plugin compatibility: WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, W3TC, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache
• REST API and WP-CLI commands
• Theme-overridable templates and documented hooks

Privacy Search analytics are stored in your own database. IP addresses are hashed with SHA-256 and never stored raw; session identifiers are random. There is no telemetry, no licence check and no phone-home of any kind. The plugin registers suggested privacy policy text and hooks into the WordPress personal data export and erase tools.

1. Upload the plugin to /wp-content/plugins/ozy-smart-search/, or install it through Plugins > Add New.
2. Activate it. The setup wizard opens automatically.
3. Choose which post types to index. WooCommerce products are enabled automatically when WooCommerce is active.
4. Let the first index run. It processes in the background; the dashboard shows progress.
5. Add search to your site with the block, your page builder's widget, the [ozy_smart_search] shortcode, or by leaving the default-search replacement enabled.

Semantic search is optional and can be set up later on the AI Providers screen.

1.0.6

• Tested against WordPress 7.1.
• PHP 8.4 no longer logs a deprecation notice on every request that touches an AI provider. The embedding methods declared an optional model argument with an implicit nullable type.

1.0.5

• The custom CSS field is gone. Styling is done with the typed controls in the Design Studio, and any CSS saved by an earlier version is discarded on update.
• Attribution is off by default and opt in. "Powered by OZY" only appears on the front end after an administrator turns it on under Tools.
• Autocomplete no longer suggests titles a visitor cannot already see. A site indexing private posts could surface their titles through the public suggest endpoint.
• Options, transients, tables, post meta, shortcodes and query arguments moved from the oss_ prefix to ozyss_. Stored data does not carry over, so reactivate and rebuild the index after updating.
• Translations load through WordPress instead of load_plugin_textdomain().

1.0.4

• Divi, Bricks and Avada modules now appear in their builders. Integrations were detected before WordPress loaded the theme, so a builder that ships as a theme always looked absent and only the shortcode worked.
• WPML and Polylang sites no longer serve one language's results to another. The cached response was keyed without the active language, so whichever language ran a query first answered it for all of them.
• Searches are markedly faster on larger sites. Term statistics were costing one full pass over the index per search term and were cached only for the length of a single request; they now take one pass in total and persist between requests.
• Tested against WordPress 7.0. The admin screens now mount through createRoot, the React 18 API WordPress has shipped since 6.2, instead of the render() call it deprecated. WordPress 6.0 and 6.1 keep the old path.
• Filter payloads are normalised before they are sanitised, so an unexpectedly shaped request can no longer raise a PHP error.
• The search endpoint bounds query length, result count and offset.
• Every directory carries an index.php, so a server with directory listing enabled cannot enumerate the plugin.

1.0.3

• Every builder now carries the same design controls: accent, field background, text, icon and border colours, corner radius, field width and padding. Added to WPBakery, Divi, Beaver Builder, Bricks, Avada, Brizy and the block editor.
• Those controls now reach the widget. Divi, Beaver and Avada wrote them onto a wrapper element, where the widget never picked them up.
• The same values are available on the shortcode, so any builder without a native module can set them.

1.0.2

• Dark mode is opt in. A widget follows the operating system only when the Design Studio is set to Auto, so the light design previewed there is what the page shows.
• Sites updating from an earlier version have Auto moved to Off; pick Auto again in the Design Studio to keep following the system.
• Version upgrades run without needing the plugin to be reactivated.

1.0.1

• The widget stylesheet is registered on every front end request, so a page builder that declares it as a dependency always gets it. Without this a widget could render with none of its own styling.
• Page builder colour and typography controls no longer inherit the builder's global palette; the Design Studio design is what shows until a control is set deliberately.
• Result links, titles and excerpts keep their own colours when a builder applies site wide theme styles.
• The field, its icons and the clear, voice and submit buttons outrank theme rules that style bare inputs and buttons.
• Light presets ship with dark mode off rather than following the operating system.
• Fixed radii and offsets that were dropped in the minified stylesheet.

1.0.0

• Initial release.
• BM25 relevance ranking with configurable per-field weights.
• Fuzzy matching, synonyms and stopwords.
• Optional semantic search across five AI providers, with a fallback chain.
• Optional AI reranking and query understanding.
• Custom field indexing for ACF, Secure Custom Fields, Meta Box, OZY Custom Fields, CMB2 and Carbon Fields.
• WooCommerce products, variations, SKUs, attributes and product cards.
• Multiple independent search engines.
• Faceted filtering and a full search results page.
• Design Studio with six presets and no-code styling.
• Native widgets for the block editor, Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, Beaver Builder, Oxygen, Bricks, Avada and Brizy.
• Search analytics with zero-result tracking and generated recommendations.
• Voice search, search history and full keyboard navigation.
• Multisite, WPML and Polylang support.
• Cache and SEO plugin compatibility.
• REST API and WP-CLI commands.