19 thoughts on “Acquia Search

  1. Matt, call me naive but why would you spend all the processing power to encrypt indexed content while this content is intended to be publicly found. Isn’t this what the search is intended for in the first place?

  2. Technically any CMS should be able to create a plugin for Acquia’s hosted search service. Let me know if you want to give that a try, or if you want to chat a bit about what we have done.

  3. It sounds interesting but I would hope that you would leave intact and continue to improve upon the built-in search for wordpress.org sites. I’m not a big fan of relying on external services for my site and do so sparingly.

    1. Yes and there is a Google Summer of Code project on this right now, but as with video processing we’re limited by the resources available to us by default and it’s something that could be fairly efficiently done as a remote service.

  4. Solr and Lucene are so extremly powerfull Open Source Tools. I think they have the potential to change the way we think of Content Management,

  5. I’m not sure an external (and centralized) search engine is needed – but improvements to the search features built into WordPress would really kick ass. Advanced search? Sort by relevance instead of reverse-chronological dump? Boolean searches? I suppose if those are only possible via Lucene and Solr, then give’r, but a better, more flexible native search would make more sense first.

      1. Well you can already filter search results by category, tag, author, exclusions, date, almost any piece of metadata that is addressable by WP_Query. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a plugin UI for it.

      2. if google results were displayed in reverse chronological order, how useful would you find it? google sorts by relevance, which completely changes the value of the results.

    1. Very cool, I had heard about this but lost following it somewhere along the way. Thanks for bringing it back to my attention.

  6. Ted, not all content is intended to be found by all users. Assuming some amount of access control in the CMS, you’d want access control in the search system as well.

    External search isn’t needed for smaller sites. But once you being to scale to lots of traffic, the built-in CMS search tends not to keep up. Off-loading search to another server, one with data storage and processing power dedicated toward the indexing and retrieval of content, is a quick way to help sites scale. Installing and maintaining those search services, however, is more complex than running your average PHP CMS. Hence the hosted search services.

  7. Adam, point taken. I guess on my blog I have sold my soul to Google and replaced the internal search with Google custom search.

    Personally I’d be more interested in a natural language query to the point where “orange female cat” can also return “ginger feline queen”

  8. Relevanssi can achieve most of what’s mentioned in this old post. Just found it while googling (ironically) for good search engines for WP.

    In the WP world, I still have to find something better than Relevanssi. It’s not ideal yet, as the interface and API (to show and filter the results) can be MUCH better, but it’s much better than the alternative.

Leave a Reply to Ted SzukalskiCancel reply