Rankology Ajax Live Search

Description

Rankology Ajax Live Search upgrades the native WordPress search experience with fast, modern AJAX results, a dedicated relevance index, and a polished admin workflow. Visitors get instant suggestions as they type; site owners get visibility into what people search for and what they cannot find.

Built for production sites, Rankology is suitable for blogs, business websites, membership portals, and WooCommerce stores that need accurate, configurable search without slowing down the front end.

Search experience

• Live AJAX search — Results update as visitors type, with configurable debounce and keyboard-friendly navigation.
• Autocomplete suggestions — Surface popular, recent, and Google-style query suggestions before a full search runs.
• Multiple result layouts — Vertical dropdown, horizontal grid, polaroid tiles, and isotopic masonry.
• Visual polish — Thumbnails, keyword highlighting, smart excerpts, and 8 built-in color themes (Classic, Dark Pro, E-commerce, Glass, Magazine, Material Design, Minimal, Neon).
• Single-result redirect — Optionally send visitors straight to the destination when only one match is found.
• Modal and voice search — Open search in a modal overlay and accept voice input where supported by the browser.
• Add to cart from results — Add WooCommerce products straight from the live results dropdown, no page reload required.
• Trending / popular searches widget — Surface trending queries on the frontend as a standalone block, shortcode, or classic widget.
• Live filtering on archive pages — Apply the same AJAX filters directly on taxonomy and post-type archive pages, not just the search results view.
• Responsive UI — Mobile-friendly search instances and result panels.

Relevance and performance

• Custom search index — Dedicated indexing engine with BM25-style relevance scoring and configurable field weights.
• Configurable content scope — Include posts, pages, products, custom post types, taxonomies, and custom fields.
• File indexing — Optional extraction of text from attached PDF, DOCX, and TXT files.
• WooCommerce ready — Search products, show prices, add to cart from results, and weight SKU and catalog fields.
• Caching and rate limiting — Protect the public search endpoint from abuse while keeping responses fast.

Filters and discovery

• Live filters — Taxonomy, price range, and custom field filters with AJAX updates, usable in search results and on archive pages.
• Filter builder — Configure filter panels from the admin without writing code.
• SERP templates — Customize the on-site search results page experience, including archive fields, SEO fields, and template layout.
• Result Tuning — a dedicated workspace covering:
  • Redirects — send specific queries to a chosen URL by pattern, role, or language.
  • Merchandising — pin, promote, or hide specific results, with optional scheduled campaign windows (e.g. Black Friday) that activate and expire automatically.
  • A/B Experiments — test ranking or layout variations and compare performance.
  • Synonyms — map alternate terms to the same results.
  • Stop Words — exclude noise words from matching.

Search widgets

Create unlimited Search Widgets — each an independent placement with its own post types, layout, theme, behavior, filters, and relevance-weight overrides.

• Gutenberg block (rankajlisrh/search)
• Shortcode: [rankajlisrh]
• Standalone filter panel shortcode: [rankajlisrh_filters]
• Trending searches shortcode: [rankajlisrh_trending_searches]
• Classic widget
• Per-widget shortcodes for precise placement in headers, sidebars, and landing pages

Smart Search (AI-assisted, optional)

Connect OpenAI, Google Gemini, or Anthropic Claude to layer AI features on top of the core search engine — nothing here is required for the plugin to work:

• AI Overviews — a generated summary paragraph above the result list.
• Per-result AI summaries — short AI-written summaries for individual hits.
• Smart query understanding — typo correction and natural-language constraint parsing (e.g. « red shoes under $50 »).
• Intent ranking — reorders results based on detected query intent.
• Semantic redirects — AI-assisted fallback matching for redirect rules when no exact pattern matches.
• Related content & « People also search for » — AI-surfaced related content carousel and related-query suggestions.
• Personalization & click learning — results adapt per-session based on prior clicks, without user accounts or persistent profiles.
• Phrase autocomplete — AI-assisted phrase-level suggestions.
• Usage & cost dashboard — track token usage and estimated cost per provider.
• Encrypted API keys — provider keys are encrypted at rest, never stored as plaintext.

Analytics and optimization

Understand how search performs on your site:

• Overview dashboard — Top queries, trending terms, and zero-result searches.
• Search logs — Detailed query history with results count, click tracking, device, and locale.
• Per-search detail view — Drill into an individual search: query, filters applied, results returned, and clicks.
• Engagement tracking — Anonymous scroll-depth funnel and mouse heat-zone data for the search results area.
• Zero-result and low-CTR alerts — Scheduled checks that flag queries returning nothing or rarely getting clicked, so content or indexing gaps get noticed automatically.
• Query redirect rules — Send specific searches to a chosen URL by pattern, role, or language.
• Exports — Download analytics as CSV or a printable PDF report.
• Scheduled email reports — Optional periodic analytics summaries sent via WordPress wp_mail().

Developer tools

• REST API — Headless and custom integrations under the rankajlisrh/v1 namespace: search, click tracking, redirects, merchandising, A/B experiments, engagement tracking, personalization, voice parsing, and streaming AI summaries.
• WP-CLI commands — wp rankajlisrh index rebuild|status|reindex, cache flush, benchmark, and embed (generate Smart Search embeddings) from the command line.
• Extensible hooks — Customize search criteria and response payloads via WordPress filters.
• Multisite aware — Network-level settings synchronization, with optional per-subsite overrides for individual sites in a WordPress multisite install.
• Privacy tools integration — Search logs are included in WordPress core’s personal data export and erase tools, and analytics tracking respects the WP Consent API « statistics » category when active.
• Compatibility layer — Automatic detection of, and remediation adapters for, common caching plugins (so cached pages don’t serve stale search results) and page builders (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, Bricks).
• Migration tools — One-click import from Ajax Search Pro and SearchWP, plus Rankology’s own JSON settings export/import for backups and staging-to-production moves.

Admin

A unified Rankology menu in wp-admin: Dashboard, Search Indexing, Appearance, Search Filter, SERP Builder, Result Tuning, Smart Search, Analytics & Logs, Integrations, Tools, and Settings — organized set up → tune → measure → maintain, for clarity on both small blogs and larger editorial teams. Search Widgets are managed from their own screen (Rankology → Search Widgets).

Credits

Bundled libraries

• Composer ClassLoader — MIT License. Copyright (c) Nils Adermann, Jordi Boggiano. Used for PSR-4 autoloading in vendor/composer/.

WordPress core dependencies (not bundled)

• jQuery — Admin and frontend UI interactions.
• WordPress packages (wp-element, wp-components, wp-i18n) — Admin dashboard hub UI.

Optional Composer libraries (not bundled)

• smalot/pdfparser — LGPL-3.0. Optional. PDF attachment text extraction.
• phpoffice/phpword — LGPL-3.0. Optional. DOCX attachment text extraction.

TXT file extraction uses native PHP only.

Compatible plugins (not bundled)

• WooCommerce — Product search, prices, SKU weighting, and variation indexing.
• WPML — Per-language indexing and search filtering.
• Polylang — Per-language indexing and search filtering.
• Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) — Custom field indexing and filter UI.
• WP Mail Logging — View scheduled analytics email content from the admin.

Privacy Policy

This plugin stores search analytics, index data, and plugin settings in your WordPress database. It does not phone home to Rankology servers.

Personal data export and erasure

Search logs associated with a visitor are included automatically in WordPress core’s built-in personal data export and erase tools (Tools → Export/Erase Personal Data), so data-subject requests can be fulfilled without manual database work.

Consent Awareness

When the WP Consent API is active, Rankology checks the visitor’s « statistics » consent category before logging search queries, clicks, or engagement data. If a compatible consent plugin has not granted that category, tracking is skipped for that visitor.

Google Suggest API

When Google-style autocomplete is enabled in Rankology → Appearance → Autocomplete, the plugin may send partial search terms from your site to Google’s public suggestion service at https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search.

• What is sent: The current partial search query and optional language or region parameters.
• When it is sent: Only while autocomplete is enabled and local suggestion sources do not already fill the suggestion list.
• Why it is sent: To retrieve Google-style query suggestions for visitors.
• Caching: Responses are cached locally with WordPress transients to reduce repeat requests.
• Third-party policy: Review Google’s Privacy Policy for how Google handles data sent to its services.

AI provider integrations (optional)

When Smart Search AI features are enabled and an API key is configured, the plugin may send request data to your selected provider (OpenAI, Google Gemini, or Anthropic Claude) to generate summaries, query understanding, or related AI-assisted search output.

• What may be sent: Search query text and limited content context required to generate a response (for example, titles and excerpts for summary generation).
• When it is sent: Only when AI features are enabled and a remote provider is selected in plugin settings.
• Why it is sent: To return AI-generated search enhancements configured by the site owner.
• Caching: AI responses may be cached locally (WordPress transients) when response caching is enabled.
• Third-party policies: OpenAI Privacy Policy, Google Privacy Policy, Anthropic Privacy Policy.

Email reports

If you enable scheduled analytics email reports, message content is sent through your WordPress site’s configured mail transport (wp_mail()). Rankology does not provide or operate that mail service.

Voice search

When voice search is used in supported browsers, speech recognition is handled by the visitor’s browser. Rankology does not record or transmit audio to its own servers.