Search Everything — A WordPress Plugin to Search Pages, Comments, and More
How effective WordPress search can be? If you’ve been using WordPress for anything beyond posting simple web content, you should find that it lacks in certain search options. For example, it doesn’t even allow you to search for pages, not to mention comments, excerpts and other options like searching only approved pages and comments.
Dan Cameron has a useful WordPress plugin that tries to solve this problem. The plugin is properly named Search Everything (SE). You should use this plugin too if you want to extend WordPress search capability.
Why Do You Need Search Everything?
For instance, I use pages to create flagship content for my blog, i.e. build linked content silos instead of using categories. The content may be available from every blog pages, but still having a search function help people locate information if they know what they want.
Of course, there are some pages that I want to keep invisible, like the thank you page for email subscription. Having an option to exclude posts or pages can be very helpful.
Future versions are going to include options for visitors and even more searchable content.
Features of Search Everything
Here are a list of features and options available right now:
- Search every page (non-password protected)
- Search approved pages only
- Exclude some post or page IDs. You can find this in the Manage Posts / Pages section in the Dashboard. Move your mouse pointer over the blog post and look at the status bar. Jot down the number in post variable.
- Exclude categories. Find this option in the Manage Categories section in the Dashboard. Hover over the category and look in at the status bar for the number in the cat_ID variable.
- Search every tag name.
- Search every category name.
- Search every comment.
- Search approved comments only.
- Search every excerpt.
- Search every attachment.
- Search every custom field (metadata).
Installation
- Download the Search Everything plugin and unzip it.
- Put the ‘search-everything‘ directory into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate‘ next to Search Everything.
- Go to the Settings > Search Everything and configure your site.
Of course, you can use Google custom search to direct users to Google when searching for your blog content. That makes every blog pages of yours that have been indexed by Google available for your readers. This is an alternative monetization option too, if you prefer, because it includes AdSense ads.
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