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.

If you do not wish to use the search module it can be deactivated 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.

Content that is indexed in the search index by default:

Posts
Pages
Media
Custom Post Types (registered with show_in_search or public)
Post Meta
Post Terms
Post Author
Users
User Meta
Terms
Term Meta

Note: Post meta that is "protected" - i.e. has a key beginning with _ - will not be indexed automatically. To index these fields, use the ep_prepare_meta_allowed_protected_keys filter. It will accept a value of boolean true (which will index all protected meta) or an array containing the keys of specific protected meta fields you want to index.

When used in conjunction with the Media Rekognition feature, all images are processed for automatic keyword detection and stored in the search index too.

CMS Query Integration

The method for determining whether CMS queries are handled by Elasticsearch or MySQL uses sensible defaults, but can also be controlled in more granular ways through code. Special handling is required for supporting partial search terms common in autosuggest or "typeahead" interfaces.

Find out how to control Elasticsearch query integration and how to use autosuggest search here.

Search Configuration

The default search behavior can be tuned to allow for stricter or more permissive matching, as well as enabling advanced search query capabilities such as using quoted strings for exact matches. You can also tune the relevancy of specific fields and how fuzzy matching works.

See Search Configuration for full details.

Custom User Dictionaries

A subset of search configuration is the ability to upload custom user dictionaries for adding synonyms, stop words and custom text analysis for Japanese to further tune and improve search results.

Document Indexing

All documents that are uploaded to the media library can also be parsed and indexed. For example, if you upload a PDF file, the PDF content will be read and included in the search index. Searches for keywords and phrases that are included in the document will be then be included in search results.

The following document types are parsed and their content is added to the search index:

PDF
PPT
PPTX
XLS
XLSX
DOC
DOCX

To enable the indexing of document content, set the modules.search.index-documents setting to true.

Search Index Modification

It is also possible to modify the specific fields stored for each post to provide extra search data that is not included by default. See Search Index Modification for details.

Using Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is used to provide the search index, as such as a developer you can make direct use of Elasticsearch for advanced feature development. See Using Elasticsearch for details.

Elasticsearch Mapping

To verify one or all Elasticsearch mappings are as expected, you can use the wp elasticpress get-mapping subcommand. The command will print all mappings as a JSON string, which is in line with how index data is provided.

By passing an optional index name, the response includes mappings for that index only:

wp elasticpress get-mapping --index-name=ep-mysitealtisdev-post-1

To format this in a human-readable way, you may want to pipe the output to a script that allows for pretty-printing JSON, for example, like so:

wp elasticpress get-mapping | jq . (see jq)
wp elasticpress get-mapping | json (see json)

This also works when executing the WP-CLI command within Local Server from your host:

composer server cli -- elasticpress get-mapping | jq .

Using Google Analytics (GA)

Google Analytics can be configured to ingest search queries for further analysis and insights. This will inform future weightings and search configuration modifications. When configuring GA, the default query parameter value is s, see Google Analytics - Set up Site Search for more information.

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)
"users": true (default)|false
"terms": true (default)|false

To find related posts leveraging Elastic Search 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, a widget ElasticPress - Related Posts is created that 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 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.

This feature enhances search forms on the website to show a dropdown list of suggestions as users type.