<p>This plugin adds Spotlight ™ like live search with an ajax popup to<br />
the default search box. See the screenshot.</p>
<p>It can be used as a widget or directly as a PHP call in the theme.</p>
<p>The Live Search Plugin is heavily based on John Nunemaker’s<br />
<a href="http://www.wp-plugins-db.org/plugin/addicted-to-live-search/" rel="nofollow ugc">Addicted To Live Search</a>.</p>
<h4>Changelog</h4>
<ul>
<li>1.4.7 Fix by Tony for “With mouseover on result in IE, there is no background image or color”.</li>
<li>1.4.6 Added livesearchpopup_resultsbox(width) to put the popup below a search box of your choice, e.g. from a theme.</li>
<li>1.4.5 Do not initialize if no livesearchpopup_results is found. In contrast to the original live search this plugin does not make sense without the popup anyway. This fixes a JavaScript bug in IE7.</li>
<li>1.4.4 Use wpurl instead of siteurl to allow installations of WordPress at different addresses (thanks to Draco)</li>
<li>1.4.3 Use <?php instead of <? in live-search-popup.php</li>
<li>1.4.2 Force update script to update the plugin.</li>
<li>1.4.1 Switched to the_post instead of the deprecated wp_start().</li>
<li>1.4 Finally permalinks work together with this plugin. In addition a “Show all” links was added at the bottom for the case that there are more posts than shown in the popup (thanks to Marco Luthe).</li>
<li>1.3.4 Moved the placeholder and autocomplete attributes of the search box to JavaScript as they are not XHTML valid (thanks to Marco Luthe)</li>
<li>1.3.3 Added some print commands in front of get_bloginfos (thanks to upekshapriya who noticed that)</li>
<li>1.3.2 Force update script to update the plugin.</li>
<li>1.3.1 Relative paths in css to allow installation which are not at the domain root.</li>
<li>1.3 Fixed behaviour for change and blur events of the search box. This fixes the “click-through” bug.</li>
<li>1.2.1 Updated to reflect that it works with 2.3 as well.</li>
<li>1.2 Bugfixes</li>
<li>1.1 Bugfixes</li>
<li>1.0 First release</li>
</ul>


Live Search Popup

Spotlight (tm) like live search with an ajax popup

Dana Ross

<p>Dave’s WordPress Live Search adds “live search” functionality to your WordPress site. As visitors type words into your WordPress site’s search box, the plugin continually queries WordPress, looking for search results that match what the user has typed so far.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://ajaxpatterns.org/Live_Search" rel="nofollow ugc">live search</a> technique means that most people will find the results they are looking for before they finish typing their query, and it saves them the step of having to click a submit button to get their search results.</p>
<p>This functionality requires Javascript, but the search box still works normally if Javascript is not available.</p>
<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CGR2bJ1mLM<br />
<a href="https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/daves-wordpress-live-search/assets/intro_video_transcript.txt" rel="nofollow ugc">transcript</a></p>
<p>This plugin is compatible with the <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xlanguage/" rel="ugc">xLanguage</a> and <a href="http://wpml.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">WPML</a> plugins for internationalization (i18n) of search results.</p>
<h3>Filters</h3>
<p>See <a href="https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/daves-wordpress-live-search/trunk/filter_examples.php" rel="nofollow ugc">filter_examples.php</a> in<br />
the plugin files for examples of how to use these filters. Remember, these filters only affect the<br />
Dave’s WordPress Live Search display, not the normal WordPress search results or the posts themselves.</p>
<ol>
<li>dwls_alter_results</li>
<li>dwls_attachment_thumbnail</li>
<li>dwls_post_title</li>
<li>dwls_the_excerpt</li>
<li>dwls_post_date</li>
<li>dwls_author_name</li>
<li>dwls_alter_result_template</li>
<li>dwls_post_custom</li>
<li>dwls_query_fields</li>
</ol>
<h3>Wish List</h3>
<p>Features I want to implement in future releases:</p>
<ol>
<li>“No results found” message (optional)</li>
</ol>


Dave's WordPress Live Search

At first, this seems like a good plugin and it is. I tried to report a bug a couple of months ago and, despite the fact the plugin says it's compatible with the latest version of WordPress, there seems to be bugs that are not addressed. At this point, I had to hack the plugin and edit source code to make it work.

Unmaintained plugin

You do a great job

Adds "live search" functionality to your WordPress site. Uses the built-in search and jQuery.

Live Search Popup vs Dave's WordPress Live Search