Making WordPress Search Kick-ass with Elasticsearch

Discover the power that is Elasticsearch! Supercharge your site with the ability to implement autosuggest, fuzzy matching, search facets and relevant results in your next project. We’ll discuss why search is important, what Elasticsearch is and what it is capable of.

Transcript

1. Making WordPress Search Kick-ass with Elasticsearch aaronjholbrook aaronjholbrook.com
3. Why is search important?
4. More than half of all users are search dominant http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-and-you-may-find/
5. Search lets users control their own destiny “I don't want to have to navigate this site the way they want me to. I just want to find the thing I'm looking for.” http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
7. Search is users’ escape hatch when they are stuck Make it easy to use, make it available http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
10. Assume most users will be unwilling or unable to refine their search query http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
12. Emphasis should be on increasing users’ success on their first search attempt http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
13. Help users succeed before they even hit enter
14. Most users cannot use advanced search or Boolean query syntax http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
15. Emphasize your search engine’s ability to handle simple queries and still produce high-quality results http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-navigation/
17. WordPress Search (sucks)
18. Poor Performance
19. Inflexible and rigid matching algorithms (match based on regular expression)
20. Does not comprehend typos or ‘close’ words
21. Does not search metadata or taxonomies
22. Can not (easily) determine facets of results
23. Relevancy of results is poor
24. Improving WordPress Search
25. Improving WordPress Search with Elasticsearch
26. Elasticsearch is a search server based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
27. Elasticsearch is a search server based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
28. Elasticsearch is a search server based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
29. Elasticsearch is a search server based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
30. Elasticsearch is a search server based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
31. Relevant results
32. Relevant results Autosuggest
34. Relevant results Autosuggest Fuzzy Matching
36. Relevant results Autosuggest Fuzzy Matching Proximity Search
37. Relevant results Autosuggest Fuzzy Matching Proximity Search Search Metadata
38. Relevant results Autosuggest Fuzzy Matching Proximity Search Search Metadata Search Taxonomies
39. Relevant results Autosuggest Fuzzy Matching Proximity Search Search Metadata Search Taxonomies Facets
43. Many more features: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search.html
44. ElasticPress
46. Install the Elasticsearch Application https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch
47. Install ElasticPress https://github.com/10up/ElasticPress
48. Deep breath..
49. Activate and connect to Elasticsearch address/port (default port is 9200)
50. Success!
51. Without ElasticPress With ElasticPress
52. aaronjholbrook aaronjholbrook.com