Jetpack Instant Search!

Jetpack's search function has been around for some time. When enabled, it replaces your built-in WordPress search (full features but not good) with an Elasticsearch-supported solution that is faster and has better results. I've been using CSS-Tricks for quite some time, which is a big improvement over using Google's custom search engine.

Jetpack has just improved their game again, launching a brand new search upgrade. You can use Jetpack search as before, or enable instant search and take advantage of this new search experience (both internal and external).

Full page experience

Instant search provides a search experience with full page coverage. I think this is great. This is their mindset when users are searching, and it is very important to give them all the space they need to accomplish their goals. Here is my search (video):

As far as I know, CSS-Tricks has hundreds of thousands of live searches per month, so having a good experience is very important to me. I don't even want to mess around with a bad in-site search experience, or overpriced products. I would rather send people to a website-wide Google search than to a bad in-site search. Fortunately, instant search is almost the best in-site search experience I can imagine, especially when it comes to implementation without any work.

Design Control

You can control the appearance through a customizer.

Instant search is designed to work for any website, so you may not have to do much. I was very surprised that CSS-Tricks worked very well out of the box. As a CSS control freak, I did make some design tweaks to it, but it's just because I like to do this kind of thing.

No need for adjustments

In previous versions of Jetpack search, I used custom code to tweak Elasticsearch. I did things like using comment counts as a popularity metric to make sure our best content ranks high in the results. Remember that despite its powerful capabilities, it does not have the entire Internet model to calculate correlations like Google. But the good news is:

To further improve our search algorithm, we began to try to add the percentage of page views over the past 30 days to the index. We eventually found that page views are a better ranking signal because it combines popularity and relevance to some extent. So now our results rankings are largely affected by the number of page views a post or page gets. Conveniently, if you get a lot of Google search traffic, our search results should be strongly influenced by Google's ranking algorithm.

My focus. Using Jetpack instant search, I can delete all my custom code (deleting the code always feels great) because the new algorithm does a great job of ranking results.

Pricing

Now Jetpack search is paid on demand, not baked into a specific plan. Don't need it? You don't have to pay for this. Only this feature is required? No matter what plan you use, you can buy it.

As far as I know, pricing is about scope. The Jetpack program is about functionality, not the size of the website, but that doesn't make much sense for searches because the size of the website is very important. So it's a sliding ruler based on the "records" you have, which are basically posts and pages.

I think many sites fall into the category of $25 per month (with 15% off per year). You may mostly care about in-site searches with more than 1,000 records, while 10,000 records are a lot. I paid a level higher than this (about $612 per year) just because our (now archived) bbPress forum pushed the number to over 10,000. This is a very fair price for a website like me.

Wishlist

One of the things I want to do the most is that I want to be able to easily remove something from the search results. We have gained a lot of records from the bbPress forums that have been closed this year. Deleting these records will put me in a lower pricing tier, but more importantly, I would rather not show these results in the search at all.

It's not just CSS-Tricks in an unusual situation. I also enabled Jetpack instant search on CodePen documents.

In this case, I would consider removing blog posts from search results (believe it or not) so that only our core document pages are displayed. Or maybe better yet, blog posts are simply turned off as filters by default, but users can turn them on to view them in the results.

All in all, this is a huge upgrade to Jetpack and another reason I think it is the most important plugin I run on my WordPress website. If you are curious about the other Jetpack features we use, we have created a dedicated page for this.

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