We recommend to all our clients that integrate Google Custom Search into their site to optimize their website’s search box results instead of using WordPress’ poor inbuilt search.
Google is the world-leader in search, and Google Custom Search gives a sense of familiarity to your visitors when they use it. The only real drawback is that there is a fee to remove Adsense ads from the results which sometimes show above your site’s results (note that no other sites show in the results section irrespective of whether you pay the fee or not).
Key differences between the WordPress’ inbuilt search and Google Custom Search:
| Search Results: | WordPress | Google Custom Search |
|---|---|---|
| Ordered by: | Date | Relevance |
| Excerpt: | Default Sometimes includes search term |
Relevant Always includes search term |
| Search term highlighted: | No | Yes |
| Spelling corrections: | No | Yes |
| Handling different content types: | Can be problematic | Automatic |
| Content searched: | Individual content only | Entire page content |
The first key difference is the search results ordering: WordPress’ returns results ordered by date, not by relevance. This means that the most recent posts are given prominence over older ones, even if older articles are more focused on the search term than newer ones. Further, by showing default WordPress excerpts, it makes it hard for visitors to know whether or the search result is useful to them.
Search terms are not highlighted in the excerpts and there’s no spelling corrections – both are subtle but highly practical features which we’ve come to rely on when using Google.
Having a WordPress site with different content types really requires having a special search template that looks good for all types of content. Often a blog design will have, for example, pages and posts that look quite different (blogs are often designed with dates, authors, excerpts, features images etc in mind; while pages are not). Trying to come up with a format that displays both nicely may not be easy or look good. This is even more complex when you have lots of content types.
WordPress inbuilt search can only ever search individual content; it’s not going to come up with any special pages like category archives or other pages that have dynamic functionality. Google indexes the entire content of the page.
We hope that search is improved in future versions of WordPress, but until then, Google Custom Search is the best option available.
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