Super Speedy Search

Description

High quality fast search results have long been a problem with WordPress and WooCommerce. Not only are the traditional search techniques inaccurate, they’re slow too!

Super Speedy Search solves this using multiple full-text indexes which improve accuracy and transform speed.

It’s so fast that we’ve made it search as you type. So, users start typing ‘Harry Potter’ and before their very eyes, your shop archive updates with all of your Harry Potter products.

• Optimises the speed of search results – 0.3s DB time on our 800,000+ product store
• Improves the relevance of search results – choose from multiple sorting options – title relevance, body relevance, or a mix of these combined with date recency scoring
• Optimises standard search results pages automatically to use MATCH instead of LIKE (works with any post type including custom post types)
• Uses real fulltext search indexes (rather than the LIKE operator like other plugins), so you get accurate results fast
• Works directly on your existing database, so no monthly costs, no costly third-party service required, no latency
• Sub-second (0.44s) search results on our reference 800,000 product WooCommerce store (running on a $40pcm server)
• Also optimises searches in the wp-admin back-end – e.g. Product SKU search
• Optionally, you can skip the use of the free-text search index and continue using the LIKE operator if you need features like user-controlled sort options on the search results page

Note: for the full text index to work, you need a compatible database and host (MySQL 5.6+). Shared hosting will probably not allow the full-text index, but self-hosting or any decent managed hosting will.

How it works

Most premium text-search plugins use the LIKE operator to search your database. This is slow because it prevents the use of any indexes. It’s also inaccurate, because for the LIKE operator to get a successful match it has to match identically what is in your database.

Full-text indexes are different – they provide something called stemming which means a search for ‘childrens clothes’ will match ‘child clothes’, ‘clothes for children’ and other derivatives. Stemming means words in your database are reduced to their language root, their derivative. Because of this, accuracy is increased and your users don’t have to type exactly what’s stored in your descriptions in order to find products.

Full-text indexes also provide a relevance score. If you’ve searched on Amazon before, you know that they’re good at showing you relevant results, but it is often difficult to find relevant results with other WordPress search plugins. Super Speedy Search uses multiple full-text indexes to search across post_title, post_content and the values in wp_postmeta.

The Super Speedy Search plugin spots any free-text searches against wp_posts and replaces the default LIKE operator with the  faster and more accurate full-text search (using a MATC operator). So if you already have a search results page, this will be optimised immediately.

Super Speedy Search also adds a new widget with ajax functionality which rather than having a separate search results page, replaces your current archive search results as you type. It’s very fast as you can see in the video below which is on my reference WooCommerce affiliate site with 820,000+ products and it’s only a $40 per month Digital Ocean server.

You can also try super speedy search yourself on our FoundThru demo site.

Features

Super Speedy Search includes:

• Full-text index created automatically
• Standard search results page is auto-optimised
• Pagination on your search results
• A shortcode and a widget to let you place the search box wherever you like
• The ability to search meta_keys too, like _sku entries for WooCommerce
• The ability to configure your widgets or shortcode to search whichever post types you wish – e.g. product,post
• Search results ordering choices – you can order by date or you can order by multiple different types of ‘relevance’. Relevance is far higher and far more accurate with a fulltext index too!
• Ajax search option when using our search widget

Demo of Super Speedy Search

We have a demo site containing 820,000+ products where you can try out Super Speedy Search for yourself.

Visit https://foundthru.com/ and you’ll find the Search Widget in the sidebar.

In the screenshot below, you can see 50ms SQL time being consumed for a search for Harry Potter:

Usage Instructions

Upload the plugin files and activate it. The plugin will build the full-text index against wp_posts (title and description).

Your normal search results pages are now fully optimised – e.g. /?s=harry+potter&post-type=product

You can optionally use our search widget. It works with all post types. You’ll find the widget under Appearance->Widgets.

You can use our shortcode too:

[superspeedysearch posttypes="product,post" searchplaceholder="Search" searchbuttontext="Go"]