Search

The Search module provides a mirrored Elasticsearch index of all CMS content that is optimized for search relevance, speed and accuracy. This operates at a higher level than the primary datastore (MySQL) and is the recommended solution for searching.

The benefits of using Elasticsearch over MySQL search queries include:

• Speed
• Advanced text analysis
  • Removing HTML
  • Language dependent word stemming and stopwords
  • Language dependent tokenisation
• Configurable relevancy scores
• Fuzzy matching
• Synonyms
• Aggregations for faceted search and statistics

The default Search index and related functionality is provided by the ElasticPress plugin and the multilingual support is derived from the WordPress.com Elasticsearch library.

Support

Altis provides the Search module and underlying Elasticsearch server to facilitate search on your site, with default configuration to meet a majority of use cases.

Using developer features of the Search module requires understanding how Elasticsearch works. We recommend reading the Elasticsearch guide by Elastic.

Modifying and tuning search queries for relevance is a subjective process. Additionally, much like writing complex database queries, building custom Elasticsearch queries requires a deep understanding of how Elasticsearch works.

Guides contained in this documentation are on a best-effort basis; for help with tuning or customising search results, the Altis team can help you find a partner to facilitate your use. Altis support cannot help with tuning results, tweaking configuration, or writing custom Elasticsearch queries.

Terminology

Altis includes the Search module (altis/enhanced-search) which is built upon a WordPress plugin called ElasticPress, made by our friends at 10up. Altis adds additional functionality, including deep integration into the Altis platform.

Altis Cloud includes Elasticsearch backend servers, which are a database tuned specifically for search. The Search module sets up a connection to the Elasticsearch servers.

When content is created or updated, that content is indexed into Elasticsearch. This works similar to caching, where a copy of your original data is stored within Elasticsearch in an index (effectively, a database table). Unlike your original data, the index can also contain additional data just for search, including generated or rendered data. Each item of content is stored as a document which has fields containing the data.

When a user searches for content on your site, Altis converts this into a query. The query is run in Elasticsearch against your indexed content, which generates results with a relevancy score. Relevancy scores are based on the index configuration, field configuration, the query being run, and the indexed data.

Indexing

The indexing process is performed automatically for you by Altis, indexing most forms of content on your site. Content can be reindexed if necessary, and additional data can be indexed.

Querying

Altis automatically integrates with search queries, as well as providing autosuggest functionality automatically for your search forms.

Developers can also use custom queries for advanced feature development.

Configuration

Altis provides various configuration options to allow adjusting ElasticPress and Elasticsearch behaviour.

You can also use these options to tune relevancy scoring, including date-based "decay".

Users can also use the custom user dictionary settings to adjust how text is analyzed, including support for synonyms, stop words and custom text analysis for Japanese.

Disabling Search

The Search module works by overriding default WordPress search, which uses MySQL full-text search. If you would prefer to use MySQL search, you can deactivate the search module via your config:

{
	"extra": {
		"altis": {
			"modules": {
				"search": {
					"enabled": false
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

Note: turning this module off does not remove the Elasticsearch server. This can still be used for Native Analytics and any custom use cases.

Additionally, this will increase load on your database servers. Depending on your Altis subscription, this may incur extra cost.