How does WordPress search work behind the scenes?

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I am using WordPress search to search a range of custom post types and allow the user to drill-down into each individual post type.

However I’m finding that WordPress is not returning what I’d deem to be the ‘best’ matches first. For example, if I search for Microsoft, pages that contain the term irregularly are still returned before pages that regularly use the term.

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Basically I’m trying to find some information on how WordPress ranks pages and determines relevance and if I can influence this without having to install any plugins.

Any help much appreciated.

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2 comments

  1. EDIT – The current version of WordPress supports relevance, so this answer is no longer accurate.

    There’s no concept of rank or relevance, it’s just a simple LIKE query on the post title and content:

    ($wpdb->posts.post_title LIKE '{$n}{$term}{$n}') OR ($wpdb->posts.post_content LIKE '{$n}{$term}{$n}')

    You can use the posts_search filter to modify or completely replace the search query with your own. From /wp-includes/query.php:

    // Allow plugins to contextually add/remove/modify the search section of the database query
$search = apply_filters_ref_array('posts_search', array( $search, &$this ) );

    Also see the available query filters on the WP_Query Codex page.

  2. Since WordPress 3.7 (October 2013), search results are sorted by the following criteria (see ticket 7394):

    • Full sentence matches in post titles.
    • All search terms in post titles.
    • Any search terms in post titles.
    • Full sentence matches in post content.

    Each section and any remaining posts are then sorted by date.

    There are also new filters:

    • wp_search_stopwords, to filter stop words ignored in WHERE.
    • posts_search_orderby, to filter the ORDER BY when ordering search results.

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