Within a few days or so, we’ll have finished the coding and unit testing of an improved WordPress search tool.  Its aim isn’t to provide an advanced search tool, as offered elsewhere.  It doesn’t let you search within categories, or by tag.  It doesn’t offer a site visitor anything other than the normal WP search widget.

As a site admin you’ll be able to configure the search engine so that it offers contextual or boolean search.  We tried a mix of both, but that wasn’t working too well.  With contextual search MySQL can offer rankings, based on associated words.  So if you search for cellphone you should also see results with the words “phone” or “droid” in, but ranked lower.

So, the plugin will shortly be ready for beta testing.  And we’d like to offer to send it to ten testers who can try it out on sites that they back up regularly and who understand that this plugin will do several things:

1. Your indexes on wp-posts will grow dramatically, potentially becoming larger than the table’s contents.
2. Some low-cost or poor quality hosting may not work well with this, especially if the DB server is cranky or slow.  The plugin does its best to mitigate on that.
3. On very very large sites with tens of thousands of posts, the indexing could take some time - during that period search results could be cranky and your site may slow down.
4. The plugin schedules an overnight optimize to keep the database in check.  We can guess that on certain sites you may not want that, so be aware of this.
5. The load on your database of a search should drop dramatically.
6. You should also understand that it’s beta code - it might have issues and you do use it at your own risk.

If you’d like to test, simply comment here, leaving your e-mail address.  When the plugin is ready, we’ll then send you a copy.  We then ask that you try the plugin on your site and answer some questions that we will add to this post later.