wpSearch - Lucene search for WordPress
The author of this nice plugin for WordPress contacted me today about his Lucene based WordPress plugin, so I thought I would give it a try, as I’m obviously a big fan of Lucene and also never much cared for MySql’s search (in)capabilities.
The plugin is easy enough to install, only thing that struck me as a little odd was the need to set 777 on the permsissions. Presumably, this is so it can write the index, but perhaps it would be better to store the index outside of the plugin infrastructure. Of course, I don’t know what’s involved with writing plugins, etc. so not sure if that makes sense or not.
Indexing and enabling search was a snap, and I do think the results are good, even if my sites don’t have a ton of posts. Indexing on my “main” site (http://www.grantingersoll.com) took slightly longer than here, but I do have more posts and comments there.
Only minor suggestion I would have is that the default boosts for title and content aren’t all that great. I think the title boost was 1.8 and the content boost was 1.3. I changed mine to be title: 5 and content: 2. The way boosting works at indexing time, it has only 8 bits of granularity, there isn’t too much difference between 1.8 and 1.3 and I tend to think title matches are much more important. Thus, I made them greater. Still, very cool that the author has hooked field boosting in to begin with.
Things I would love to see:
- Highlighting
- Spell checking
All in all, seems to be a great little plugin. And now, I can “eat my own dogfood” too!
