1. Create an account on SearchIQ.
2. Copy the API key from SearchIQ account, you can find it after selecting “Add domain” option.
3. Once you’ve created an account, go to your WordPress site and install SearchIQ WordPress plugin.
4. You will be asked to enter your SearchIQ API key.
5. Select the post types you want to search.
6. Index your posts and you are all set!
For content you want users to search on your site, we first need to index it. SearchIQ allows you to index different post types along with its corresponding custom fields and taxonomy. With the interface below, you can decide what post types to index, what custom fields you want to filter out, what image in the post you want to use it as thumbnail. SearchIQ only indexes Published posts and we allow you to filter out some posts using post IDs and url patterns.
For any newly added and updated posts, SearchIQ will automatically detect and index them for you as long as the add/update is performed on the WordPress admin console. If you have a big site that you normally add and update your content through database directly, SearchIQ provides 2 solutions for you to synchronize your changes. 1. Delta Sync button – Once click, it will detect the delta and synchronize the changes for you. 2. WordPress URL endpoint – An URL endpoint that you can hit to trigger delta sync once you are done with your database update. This URL endpoint is private to your own instance. If you need this feature enabled, please contact us at support(at)searchiq.co
SearchIQ can index pdf content with a maximum size up to 10 MB each. If your pdf is associated with the post as attachment post type, it will be indexed in our end transparently. To improve the index accuracy, it is better if you make your pdf accessible (ie. provide us metadata like title, author, tags in the pdf). To do that, you can follow the video below.
If you have SearchIQ set up properly, you should be able to see our autocomplete and search result page as below. If you don’t have search bar or autocomplete is not showing up in your search bar when you type, you can follow the “Setup Your Search Bar” section of this Guide to fix it. For autocomplete, we will show title, description, and thumbnail by default. If you are using our cross-domain feature, you will see the domain name as well. For details about cross-domain search, you can consult our “Cross Domain Search” Section below. Along with search result, there is a thumbnail. For the Free account, SearchIQ will generate thumbnails in your server and serve from there. For our paid users, thumbnails are generated and hosted on SearchIQ servers and deliver through CDN for better performance and user experience.
By default, SearchIQ will return search results based on both relevancy and recency. For a particular user query, our engine will first decide what posts are relevant and rank them based on relevancy score with recency taken into consideration. That is to say, if posts are similar in relevancy, we will rank the latest one higher.
In term of search relevancy, by default, SearchIQ will use Board Match. That is one of the match options that try to boost up the search coverage by identifying content that has some terms matching the query regardless the word order and form. If you want the match to be more restrictive, you can try other matching options like “Full-term match” and “Phrase match”.
There are times you want to have a better control on the result ranking. For example, you want our search engine to give higher priority to the posts that have a title match than that of description match. To address this need, SearchIQ provides you a field weight control page under “Documents” menu tab that you can go there to adjust the weight at the field level with 10 the highest weight and 0 if you want to ignore.
If you want to have even more fine-grained control like you want to show a post at the top of the search result for a particular user query, you can achieve this by adding the user query as a tag to your post and give “Tag” field a high weight like 9 to 10 and potentially lower the “Title” weight. This feature may not allow you to explicitly decide what rank #2, #3 and so on but it allows you to show a set of posts for a particular query.
SearchIQ will provide custom sorting feature shortly. With this feature, you can do the multi-field sorting. For example, if you want the matching content ranked by popularity first and recency next, you can do it in our UI given the popularity field and post date are indexed.
SearchIQ tracks what your user’s searches and clicks on your site and provides you analytic reports. To access your domain reports, login into SearchIQ admin area, select your domain and click the Analytics on the left sidebar.
In the analytic dashboard, you can see # of searches, # of autocomplete click and # of result page click for your users within a time range you selected. For the Free account, you can examine the data for the last 24 hours. For larger time range, please consider upgrading your account. SearchIQ provides both mobile and desktop analytics. You can select view them as a whole under “Traffic: All” or individually. The reports that our users use the most are “Top Search Terms” and “Top Terms with no result” sections. For the “Top Searches Terms” section, you can find out what kinds of content your users expecting from your site. So, can follow the demand to deliver the content your users are interested in. For “Top terms with no results” section, you can see if you are really missing out some opportunities there or some search terms do not appear in your content but you have written about it. For latter, you can use our “Synonym” section to fix it. For example, if user search on apparel with brand “A&F” but your product title and description only use the full name “Abercrombie”, it may not come up as a match. If you see “A&F” in your “Top terms with no results” section, you can go to Documents > Synonym Section and add the synonym “Abercrombie, A&F”. This way you are teaching our search engine that they are the same in meaning so next time when a user types A&F in the search query, Abercrombie products will be shown up in the search result.
SearchIQ dashboard only shows you top 10 on each analytic section. If you want to obtain a bigger list up to 1000, you can click our “Export” button and download the report data in csv format.
Faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into categories that let users drill into search results (or even skip searching entirely) by any value in any field. Each facet displayed also shows the number of hits within the search that match that category. Users can then “drill down” by applying specific constraints to the search results. User studies demonstrate that faceted search provides more effective information-seeking support to users than best-first search. Indeed, faceted search has become increasingly prevalent in online information access systems, particularly for e-commerce and site search. That is why many of the large websites like Amazon already provide this feature to their users.
SearchIQ can help you to add this search feature on your site with ease. You can take the following steps to add a facet to your search bar.
From the above screenshot, 4 facets are defined for all post types and I have the facet feature turned on for both autocomplete and search result page. Below you will see the facet shown up over post search.
If you are using WooCommerce, SearchIQ will automatically set up the facets for you to get you started. However, we will just include some general WooCommerce fields like “date”, “product category”, “price” and “rating”. If you have defined some custom attributes like “Brand”, “Color” and etc. You need to add these facets yourself. See the example of our product facet below:
As some facets have a long list, SearchIQ will figure that out for you and add a little search box on top of the long list facet to make it easier for your users. Apart from the autocomplete, you can turn on facet on result page as well. With grid layout, you can basically use this feature to create a catalog for your website. See an example below:
NOTE: SearchIQ facet feature is still in beta. If you face any problem when you try to use it or you have some suggestions to make it better, please drop us an email.
SearchIQ will detect and see if your page has a search bar and associate our autocomplete widget to it. However, there are chances that we cannot detect your search bar correctly and you may not see the autocomplete appeared. If you come across this issue, you can inspect some properties from your search bar’s HTML code and fill up the info on our admin screen. Take the following search bar HTML snippet as an example.
<input type=”text” value=”Type keywords…” name=”q” id=”s” autocomplete=”off” data-default=”Type keywords…” class=”searchBox”>
You can see the search bar as an HTML form input element that has id and name. Enter the id’s value to the “Search box name” field and name’s value to “Search Query Parameter field” as follows:
If your website doesn’t have a search bar, you can follow the options below to add SearchIQ’s search bar to your site.
Note: In this widget, you can select which post type(s) you want your search bar show. With this capability, you can create a search bar just for your post, product or other entities.
Add the following shortcode anywhere on the page, post, custom post type or widget.
[siq_searchbox]
This shortcode can have the following options:
Example shortcode with options:
[siq_searchbox type="icon" placeholder="Search here" post-types="post,product" width="500" placement="right"]
1. Go to SearchIQ WordPress plugin.
2. Select Autocomplete tab.
3. Customize the fields as per your requirements.
4. If there is no customization for any specific element you are looking for, please watch the video above.
1. Go to SearchIQ WordPress plugin.
2. Select Results Page tab.
3. Customize the fields as per your requirements.
4. If there is no customization for any specific element you are looking for, please watch the video above.
1. Go to SearchIQ WordPress plugin.
2. Select Options tab.
3. Add CSS rules to override in Custom CSS text area.
4. Click Save. Its done!