Mikko Saari

Relevanssi Light replaces the default WP search with a search that uses the fulltext indexing capabilities of the database. It requires a modern version of MySQL or MariaDB.
Relevanssi Light is very powerful, as it leverages your database to do all the hard work. Even large sites will return relevant results quickly and efficiently. Indexing is fully automatic and always handled by your database server.
Thanks to Otto Kekäläinen (ottok) for the original idea, development push, and all the feedback.
Feedback is welcome. I follow the support forums here, but you can also post an issue on <a href="https://github.com/msaari/relevanssi-light" rel="nofollow ugc">the Relevanssi Light GitHub page</a>. That’s where the active development happens.
<h4>Comparison between Relevanssi Light and Relevanssi</h4>
Relevanssi Light is a simple, easy-to-use tool with limited capabilities. It provides very fast search results with better quality, but with little room for customization and adjustment.
Relevanssi is a full-fledged search solution that offers lots of features and full control over the search index and the search results. It generates useful excerpts with the search terms highlighted, can provide “Did you mean” suggestions, keeps logs and much more. Indexing and searching is much slower than with Relevanssi Light.
Relevanssi Premium adds more features to Relevanssi: it can index user profiles, taxonomy terms, and PDF content, generate related posts lists and more.

Relevanssi Light

Works really well and the plugin author is very helpful :-)

It's also very well coded with full documentation, as well as hooks and pluggable functions to allow for extension and customisation.

Great little plugin


The full Relevanssi is great, but this is usually all I need. Just a replacement for the default WP search, with more relevant results, but without the complexity of settings, indexing, extra tables, etc. Bonus: it works with jet smart filters too, and it doesn't mess up the post type filter like the base Relevanssi.


Exactly what I need

Relevanssi Light is a simple, quick and effective search improvement that replaces the default WP search with a fulltext index search.

ishitaka

Replaces site search with full-text search.
Replace the site search from LIKE search to Japanese full-text search (MySQL + Ngram parser or Mroonga engine + TokenMecab parser). This will significantly improve search performance.
Search for pure strings (plain text) without HTML tags. This will prevent HTML tags from being searched.
The data (index) for searching is stored in a dedicated table. It does not rewrite existing table structures or post data (posts table).
Searches for text in PDF, Word (doc, docx), Excel, and PowerPoint files. Secured PDF file are currently not supported.
It supports WordPress multisite.
<h4>Search string options</h4>
<ul>
<li><code>OR</code> (uppercase letter) – Combine searches. Example: foo OR bar</li>
<li><code>-</code> – Exclude words from the search. Example: foo -bar</li>
<li><code>""</code> – Search for an exact match. Example: “foo bar”</li>
<li><code>*</code> – Search by wildcard. Mroonga only. Example: foo*</li>
<li><code>()</code> – Grouping. Mroonga only. Example: (foo OR bar) baz</li>
</ul>
<h4>Operating environment</h4>
Requires MySQL 5.6 or later, or Mroonga engine.
Mroonga engine is strongly recommended. InnoDB engine performs significantly worse with large amounts of data.

Full-Text Search

Replaces site search with full-text search.

Relevanssi Light vs Full-Text Search