We have recently upgraded the search functionality on advancedcustomfields.com to WP Engine Smart Search. This enhancement significantly improves the search experience, helping you find the information you need more quickly and accurately.
The default WordPress search capability often falls short when it comes to surfacing relevant content from searches. It offers almost no configuration for weighting of data, doesn’t support operators to search for multiple words together, and it won’t search data from post meta, so it won’t pick up anything from ACF!
WP Engine Smart Search, on the other hand, was designed with the ACF community in mind. Out of the box, custom post types created with ACF will automatically index without requiring any custom coding. This is perfect for a site like advancedcustomfields.com, which uses a ‘resources’ custom post type for its documentation section.
By implementing WP Engine Smart Search, we aim to save you time and help ensure that whether you’re searching for tutorials, documentation, or support articles, you can trust that the results will be more precise and comprehensive than ever before. The new search capability on ACF also leverages the new AI-Powered Hybrid Search, a natural language search feature that gives you a GPT-like experience, combining traditional keyword-based with semantic search to produce more relevant search results. AI-Powered Hybrid Search is currently in beta testing.
WP Engine Smart Search is a unique and powerful search tool that sets itself apart from other solutions on the market. It is both easy to set up and highly customizable, making it the perfect choice for improving your site experience quickly or going beyond basic search results. Furthermore, WP Engine Smart Search is headless-ready, working flawlessly with headless WordPress sites.
“As if that wasn’t enough, Smart Search enhances the speed of site searches by transferring the indexing and search processes away from your WordPress MySQL database to a specialized search server,” says Luke Patterson, Product Manager for Smart Search.. “This approach significantly reduces the load on your WordPress site, making searches quicker and more efficient.”
The video below walks through the complete process of integrating WP Engine Smart Search with ACF to enhance searchability, using Taylor Swift lyrics as an example. You can also dive into the codebase on GitHub.
Try the improved search experience today and see for yourself how much easier it is to find the information you need, and explore how using WP Engine Smart Search for your WordPress sites enhances search capabilities and improves the user experience.
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