Search Configuration

Altis strives to provide a great out-of-the-box search experience for most uses.

For advanced usage, additional configuration is available to adjust search behaviour in indexing and querying.

Tuning

When searching, results can be ordered by relevancy score. This score is based on a blend of various factors, including index configuration, field configuration, the query being run, and the indexed data.

To help adjust relevancy, Altis provides various configuration settings to tune relevancy and search behaviour, allowing for stricter or more permissive matching, advanced query operators, and fuzzy matching.

Date Decay

For most use cases, you'll want to treat newer results as more relevant than older ones. Altis includes date decay functionality which automatically adjusts relevancy scores based on dates. These parameters can be tuned as part of the configuration.

User Dictionaries

When indexing content, Elasticsearch uses analyzers to convert text from a raw string into data which can be queried. Altis provides analyzers for common languages out of the box.

Altis also provides the ability to upload custom user dictionaries, which allow adding synonyms, stop words and custom text analysis for Japanese to improve analysis.

Additional Configuration Options

The following options can be enabled/disabled via the search configuration.

  • "related-posts": true|false (default)
  • "facets": true|false|['match-type' => "all" (default)|...]
  • "woocommerce": true|false (default)
  • "autosuggest": true|false (default) - See autosuggest
  • "users": true (default)|false
  • "terms": true (default)|false
  • "comments": true|false (default)

To find related posts leveraging Elasticsearch, use the ep_find_related() function.

The function requires a single parameter ( $post_id ) with another optional parameter ( $return ). The $post_id will be used to find the posts that are related to it, with $return specifying the number of related posts to return, which defaults to 5.

If an out of the box solution is desired, the "ElasticPress - Related Posts" widget can be added to your site's sidebar. In order for the widget to work correctly it needs to be added to the sidebar which will be displayed for a single post.

Facets

Facets are a feature in ElasticPress which add control to filter content by one or more taxonomies. A widget can be added so when viewing a content list (archive), the taxonomy and all of its terms will be displayed. This will allow a vistors to further filter content.

Depending on the configuration specified for facets, if the match-type property is set to any, it will force the results to match any selected taxonomy term. If set to all, it will match to results with all of the selected terms.