Relevanssi - A Better Search

You can find solutions and answers at the Relevanssi Knowledge Base.

Answers to many common problems can be found from the contextual menu. Just click "Help" in the top right corner of your WordPress admin dashboard on the Relevanssi settings page.

If you the results don't change after installing and activating Relevanssi, the most likely reason is that you have a call to query_posts() on your search results template. This confuses Relevanssi. Try removing the query_posts() call and see what happens.

Please read Words with punctuation can't be found. This is a Relevanssi feature, but you can fix it from Relevanssi indexing settings.

See the top of the admin menu. There's 'User searches'.

Relevanssi stores the relevance score it uses to sort results in the $post variable. Just add something like echo $post->relevance_score to your search results template inside a PHP code block to display the relevance score.

Relevanssi offers Google-style "Did you mean?" suggestions. See "Did you mean" suggestions in the Knowledge Base for more details.

It's the basic weighing scheme used in information retrieval. Tf stands for term frequency while idf is inverted document frequency. Term frequency is simply the number of times the term appears in a document, while document frequency is the number of documents in the database where the term appears. Thus, the weight of the word for a document increases the more often it appears in the document and the less often it appears in other documents.

Each document database is full of useless words. All the little words that appear in just about every document are completely useless for information retrieval purposes. Basically, their inverted document frequency is really low, so they never have much power in matching. Also, removing those words helps to make the index smaller and searching faster.