Astonishing – surprisingly perfect for our needs

We tried a number of search options, including writing our own code (with tutorial help), WP Search, and Relevanssi. Each attempt brought us closer, but we felt the final output led to customer confusion. Too many excerpts and jumbled tag lists, no differentiation between products and articles, let alone categories and keywords (tags)… it was obvious that there was little concern by the developers for user experience.

We read about this plugin and, with some reluctance, gave it a shot. All I can say is “wow” –?this is better than we thought search could be! Plenty of custom control for categories, posts, tags, authors, etc., and most importantly the ability to *disable* some areas. That is one thing that separates this plugin –?the output is neatly categorized and easy for admin to organize in priority. The end user is left with a beautiful breakdown of the results, complete with thumbnails.

You can choose “backend” mode to blend better with your template style, or you can go all-in with their search page for results (which allows for a few more features). We chose the backend mode, and have quickly grown to love it. It actually improves the function of the entire site –?our store takes on a new dimension with category searches (we have a display filter/ranking on the store page as well and they work beautifully together).

All of a sudden we can’t be without this plugin –?overnight it became an integral part of the site design. It’s fast, predictive, “fuzzy” (allowing for misspellings” and highly customizable.

We noted a couple of shortcomings, but may just need to explore more. Our concerns are:

– the granular control to remove items from search seems a bit too granular… it seems as though the only way to exclude items is to manually remove the words from the Algolia index. It becomes tedious since there can be numerous indexes depending on the areas you want included in the search (tags, authors, post titles, products, etc). There doesn’t seem to be a proactive “exclude” feature that we have found, only a reactive “delete” of found terms. To be fair, we’re still discovering things, so maybe we’ll figure this out.

– some words are entirely missed for some odd reason. We ran into a couple of incidences where we searched for a word that was clearly in the product description and the search showed no results, even after re-indexing everything.

But honestly, the pros of this plugin are simply off the charts. For us, it is a perfect fit and we are thrilled. And I have even mentioned the dashboard and usage data that is available on your Algolia account. All in all, great stuff!