For Elasticsearch hosting we exclusively use Bonsai.io. Since Elasticsearch is its own, separate application it also requires separate hosting. WEBDOGS leverages the ElasticPress WordPress plugin to establish a connection between WordPress and Elasticsearch. Like any application, Elasticsearch comes configured a particular way out of the box and it’s up to professionals like WEBDOGS to optimize the configuration and connect Elaticsearch to an incoming stream of data. Level Up Search – Key Elasticsearch Features Let’s explore some key features that will extend Google-like functionality to any site. There’s a bunch of other math and statistics that takes place to generate results, but that story isn’t as compelling as all of the other things Elasticsearch is capable of. For instance, a developer may implement a custom taxonomy in WordPress called “Industry” that a business uses to categorize From there, it gets wildly more complex but suffice to say it is incredibly powerful because it has a central database that knows which documents contain which words, as well as the frequency of a word within a document (that gives us a sense of relevance).īut wait, there’s more! Elasticsearch is also able to take into consideration metadata for given content, as well as assign values that represent importance (or “relevancy”) to content. Indexing in Elasticsearch works like this: Elasticsearch looks at each individual word within a piece of content, records that the word occurs in a given document, as well as the number of times the word occurs, and records all that within an internal database (of sorts). ![]() It’s difficult to get into the inner-workings of Elasticsearch because it is exceptionally complex, but the Elastic team provides a great initial (and fairly technical) overview in “ Elasticsearch from the Bottom Up, Part 1.”Īt the most basic level, Elasticsearch gets fed content (for instance from WordPress’ database via a plugin like ElasticPress) and “indexes” the content. Elasticseach is to search what flying in a Gulfstream is to travel. Listen, WordPress is to search what rolling down a hill in a barrel is to travel. ![]() Elasticsearch – an actual Search Application No exact match for a term in those three places within the db? No matches at all. We could go into a lot more detail, but the gist is this: WordPress has a completely unintelligent search algorithm that looks for exact matches of search terms in just three places: the content, the title, and the excerpt. If the term is preceded by a -, then it is understood as not to include. WordPress starts building a MySQL statement chain for each term. Once inside the foreach statement, the party begins. The first few lines up to the foreach statement are doing some very basic clean up of the search terms, making sure bad characters aren’t getting through. This snippet of code is from class-wp-query.php and is essentially the guts of what powers search in WordPress. So how does search in WordPress work? Well, it pretty much comes down to a few lines of code: That just not where the core team is focused. ![]() The knowledge and expertise required to to build a CMS versus a search application are completely different and WordPress doesn’t pretend to do search well. The first thing to understand about basic WordPress search is that it’s intentionally basic! WordPress is a content management system (“CMS”), not an enterprise search application. But before we dive into recommendations, it’s important to understand just how different Elasticsearch is compared to out-of-the-box WordPress search, as well as what’s possible with Elasticsearch that simply isn’t with basic WordPress search. There are a ton of options out there with respect to integrating Elasticsearch: as simple as “turning it on” in Jetpack and as complex as enterprise WordPress implementations, similar to what WEBDOGS has done for our partners like ForeScout. There’s a lot of buzz in the WordPress community about Elasticsearch and for good reason: Elasticsearch significantly upgrades basic WordPress search.
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