For a long time the search widget available to use with the standard WordPress installation has been quite bad. You could search for whatever, but it always showed results based on the newest content.
If I wrote an article three years ago named “Ten things I love about you” and searched for it in, I would not get that article out as number one, even though that would for sure be the best hit. Instead I would get all my newer articles coming out first where those words have been used inside of them, for example refering to the original article. If I in that way had more than 10 links referring to that page, I would have to go through several sites of search results before I finally found the actual site, which should have been listed as number one in the first place. So, that was the problem!
Search just got better – WordPress 3.7
As the new wordpress 3.7 was recently released search just got better. The search results have been improved in the way that they actually try to show the best results first. As I wrote my article recently about how I believe Page Rank to become less and less important, I search for an article on Incoming Links I wrote long time ago. I knew that I had written quite some articles since then where I referred to that article and linked back to it, and other articles where I simply used the expression. Still, with the new search in WordPress I got my original article about how to get better incoming links out as search result number 1! So, time to get the search widget back on your page, because this just made searching on your site better and easier, and hopefully both you and your visitors will enjoy this a whole lot!
If you want to find out what people are actually searching for on your site, I recommend the following article from howtobloginfo.net.
Do you have any thoughts, comments, inputs or ideas? Share whatever is on your heart!
