Have you ever come across a popular WordPress blog that still uses the standard WordPress search widget? If you have, then you have no doubt been frustrated by the results. Here’s a way to search WordPress blogs using a custom search engine.
Create a search engine for your blog
For those of you who don’t know, the standard search widget in WordPress returns any post that features your keyword, in reverse chronological order. It also displays the first 55 words in the post, as opposed to an excerpt highlighting the term you are searching for.
If you are trying to find something specific that was published a year ago, you may have to trawl through pages of results before you find what you want – despite it being the most relevant result. And if you are simply entering a search term in the hope that you will be presented with the most relevant content, you’re out of luck.
Add a search engine to WordPress blogs
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
