A new Extension has been released: Custom Results Order! This extension was designed and built to help you manually curate results generated by SearchWP.
Why is it necessary?
If SearchWP was originally built to return the most relevant results, why is this Extension necessary at all?
SearchWP does return the most relevant results it can find, but those results are directly tied to SearchWP’s algorithm used to find those results in the first place. As with all algorithms, there are edge cases that go against the norm, and finding search results is no different.
You are the most knowledgeable of your site content, and you know what your visitors are looking for. Using SearchWP’s Metrics you can gain insight not only into what your visitors are searching for, but also which results they’re clicking.
There will be times that visitors are clicking results that don’t rank highest in the results set. You could manually edit the engine configuration to compensate, or stuff some keywords in your content, or even create a ‘hidden’ Custom Field to stuff keywords to get the overall rank higher.
Those solutions can work, but Custom Results Order removes the burden of having to set up and manage some sort of undocumented system. It provides you with a single screen containing all of these customizations you have in place.
Make your search even better
I hope Custom Results Order helps you improve your on-site search to an even higher degree. It’s already in use on this site, making sure that customers can find the documentation they’re looking for!