Unfortunately, this plugin is no longer available for free. The author has bundled it with another program.

Have you ever searched your own WordPress site for an article you wrote a couple of months ago? Have you been dismayed that the article is not one of the first found results even when you know the title of the article? This is because WordPress sorts search results by date rather than relevance. For example, when I search on ‘Environmental Resources’, I want the first result to be my article, ‘Green Twitter: Environmental Resources‘. Instead WordPress will give me a list of all the articles that mention that title in descending order. Since, I frequently link to my own articles, I am given a list of search results that aren’t that useful.

The solution to this problem is provided by a simple plugin install. Search Reloaded, once installed and activated, will sort articles by relevance, so when I do the search mentioned above I get the expected results. The plugin does this by using the search algorithm in your MySQL database rather than the default WordPress search algorithm. The results aren’t perfect but are SO much better than what is provided in WordPress.

Search Reloaded requires WordPress version 2.3 and higher.

To use:

1. Download
2. Extract file from zip
3. Upload to your plugins folder
4. Activate
5. Enjoy

I recommend searching the same term before and after installing the plugin so you can see what a difference it makes.

photo credit: g.originals