AI-powered search: From keywords to conversations
By now, everyone’s had the opportunity to experiment with AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney and ponder their inner ...
Director, Product Marketing
By now, everyone’s had the opportunity to experiment with AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney and ponder their inner ...
Director, Product Marketing
Search has been around for a while, to the point that it is now considered a standard requirement in many ...
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies enabling services such as Alexa, Google search, and self-driving cars, the ...
VP Corporate Marketing
It’s no secret that B2B (business-to-business) transactions have largely migrated online. According to Gartner, by 2025, 80 ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Twice a year, B2B Online brings together industry leaders to discuss the trends affecting the B2B ecommerce industry. At the ...
Director of Product Marketing & Strategy
This is Part 2 of a series that dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ...
Benoit Reulier &
Reshma Iyer
Get ready for the ride: online shopping is about to be completely upended by AI. Over the past few years ...
Director, User Experience & UI Platform
Remember life before online shopping? When you had to actually leave the house for a brick-and-mortar store to ...
Search and Discovery writer
If you imagine pushing a virtual shopping cart down the aisles of an online store, or browsing items in an ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Remember the world before the convenience of online commerce? Before the pandemic, before the proliferation of ecommerce sites, when the ...
Search and Discovery writer
Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just the stuff of scary futuristic movies; it’s recently burst into the headlines ...
Search and Discovery writer
Imagine you are the CTO of a company that has just undergone a massive decade long digital transformation. You’ve ...
CTO @Algolia
Did you know that the tiny search bar at the top of many ecommerce sites can offer an outsized return ...
Director, Digital Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly moved from hot topic to everyday life. Now, ecommerce businesses are beginning to clearly see ...
VP of Product
We couldn’t be more excited to announce the availability of our breakthrough product, Algolia NeuralSearch. The world has stepped ...
Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Algolia
The ecommerce industry has experienced steady and reliable growth over the last 20 years (albeit interrupted briefly by a global ...
CTO @Algolia
As an ecommerce professional, you know the importance of providing a five-star search experience on your site or in ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Hashing. Yep, you read that right. Not hashtags. Not golden, crisp-on-the-outside, melty-on-the-inside hash browns ...
Search and Discovery writer
May 18th 2017 product
Last year, we released our WordPress plugin, allowing WordPress users to super power their search bars with an instant-search autocomplete dropdown menu.
Our focus since the beginning has been to offer non-technical users an easy way to enhance the search experience for their end users. We also wanted to keep as much flexibility for WordPress developers to be able to hook into the plugin to customize the behavior.
We already knew that making a plugin simple to use is a real challenge. This is even truer when trying to interface with a search engine such as Algolia which in fine has a lot of tunable options.
To make it as easy to use as possible, we ship our integration with default settings for the different search indices, and handle the indexing and synchronizing of content for the users behind the scenes.
One thing we learned is that by addressing both developers (by making the plugin extensible) and non-technical users, is that:
To give more power to our users, we decided to put more focus on our plugin configuration interface.
In the latest release, ordering of post types can be done by drag & drop. Header labels can be overwritten using a search input without writing a single line of code and the Algolia powered by logo can also be disabled by ticking-off a checkbox.
A complete changelog or the latest changes can be found on the plugin’s repository.
By listening to our users, we realized that most of the reported technical issues were related to our “smart” way of queueing indexing tasks.
Indeed, until this week’s release, we were making an extensive usage of custom post types and using remote HTTP calls to process the queued indexing tasks.
This mechanism, even if in theory looked like to be an ideal solution, appeared to be the main bottleneck of our search plugin.
Thanks to the whole WordPress community, we managed to take out the complexity of the plugin and we now offer a way simpler, consistent and pragmatic solution to index content.
As a result, indexing is faster, more scalable and easier to debug and reason about.
Also, one big request we had, was to let users tune the relevancy directly from the Algolia dashboard. Until now, this was not recommended because on every new re-indexing process you would loose your settings and|or synonyms.
We took this release as an opportunity to meet users expectations, and ranking and synonyms can now be customized directly from the Algolia dashboard without fear of being lost again.
We refactored about 3k lines of code for the v2 release, yet we tried to keep as much backward compatibility as possible.
Given we simplified the way we split records and store them, you should re-index all indices once the plugin has been updated.
If you previously customized your frontend search templates, you might need to compare your implementation with the new ones to adapt them.
The community has played a major role in the evolution of the plugin, and we would like to say how grateful we are.
For anyone who would like to participate, we now have a community forum where you can share your project or website to give it some visibility.
For developers, pull requests are very welcome.
No matter if you are a WordPress user or a developer, all your feedback and contributions are highly appreciated.
You can check out the latest version of the Algolia plugin for WordPress on the official plugin directory.
Powered by Algolia Recommend