WP Engine Introduces AI-Powered Search for WordPress Sites
WP Engine is rolling out AI-powered search that will support semantic search and faster search results for websites created with the WordPress platform. The proprietary tools were revealed during this week’s WP Engine virtual De{Code} conference for developers and other WordPress users.
AI and how it will change websites was a big point of discussion at this De{Code}, with keynotes devoted to the topic. The company also introduced its Smart Search and AI-Powered Hybrid Search, which promise to create a more “Chat GPT-like” experience for users searching websites created with the platform, said Luke Patterson, a product manager at WP Engine.
Site Search as a Technical Challenge
“Search is a difficult technical challenge,” Patterson told attendees. ”There’s a lot of really smart people working on search at any given time and still struggling to get it right. And so what that means is that those who can get it right, really produce a massive boon for their customers who themselves are able to then pass that boon on to their users, who in this case, are the folks who are visiting your WordPress sites.”
Add to that the fact that, increasingly, users expect a more GPT-like experience in their search, he added. And the stakes are high: Google statistics show that 82% of customers avoid websites where they’ve had search difficulties. That’s problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is that users who use search are “high intent visitors” — they literally are typing in the exact thing they want, Patterson explained.
Luke Patterson, a product manager for WP Engine, presents a slide about website search.
“They are telegraphing their intent word for word by putting it in the search bar, and if it returns nothing, either because of a misspelling or an ACF didn’t get indexed, or whatever, they’re going to bounce, and they’re not going to buy, and they’re probably never going to come back,” he said.
Leveraging Advanced Custom Fields for Smart Search
ACF stands for Advanced Custom Fields and applies to a CMS. There are solutions and plugins that allows website creators to define and add custom fields beyond the basic ones offered by WordPress, but Patterson was talking about the default WordPress search, which he acknowledged doesn’t handle these search expectations well and doesn’t allow filtering by date or tags. To create that enhanced search experience, Smart Search had to work well with ACF, he added. As it stands, indexing ACF is a “notoriously hard problem for search in WordPress.”
“What we do is we index and map your ACF fields, right out of the box, click of a button, no custom mapping, no shortcode, no code at all, you just get all of your ACFs and all of your custom post types indexed by default in Smart Search,” he said. “Now you can format your data however you want. And it’s always going to be indexed for search. And it’s always going to be updated in real-time.”
Smart Search also makes site search faster, he said, because it offloads the index and searches outside of WordPress to a dedicated search server rather than hitting your WordPress MySQL database, he said.
It also supports “fuzziness,” meaning you can adjust the parameters to tolerate a certain amount of misspellings in a term. He demoed searching a movie site for Mandalorian, but with it misspelled to Madelorean — so two letters off the correct spelling. The site was still able to locate the movie. It also supported finding the movie by searching on the the actors who appeared in Mandalorian.
“That heavy search index isn’t just sitting on your WordPress server, slowing it down,” he said. “We actually see really phenomenal performance gains from this.” One customer is doing around 10 million searches per month, and their average back-in-request search query response time was about 50 milliseconds, Patterson said.
“Offloading the search outside of your WordPress dB plus automagically indexing all your custom post types in ACF fields — that’s a place we feel that we’re […] unique here; and again, hopefully, working in a way that WordPress developers work,” he said. “This is one of the ways that we feel that we’re a contributor back to the WordPress ecosystem out there, by helping to solve this really thorny problem in what we hope is a really delightful way.”
Smart Search Allows Inference, Semantic Search
The AI-Powered Hybrid Search takes the site’s index and runs machine learning on it, turning the index into a vector database that’s searchable with natural language, he explained.
“For AI-powered search, the thing we do with your search index is, behind the scenes, we’re going to run a machine learning model on it, and we’re going to turn your index into something called a vector database,” he said. “So without getting too deep into vector technology, the end result is that after we run that machine learning, and after you get that vector database, you can run natural language searches against that vector database.”
WP Engine Smart Search demo
Hybrid search enables not just keyword search, but semantic search. It then combines the results and ranks them using an algorithm, he said. That enables users to search with inferences for themes, such as financial misdeeds, which turned up Ozark and Schitt’s Creek, or revenge, which rendered The Witcher and Loki. That brings the experience closer to ChatGPT, he added.
“Much better search results mean much better conversion for your visitors,” Patterson said. “It means a much better experience for them. That means a much better perception of your brand. And so the tech, the AI hype train, all that stuff is obviously really, really cool. But what’s cooler than being cool? Double-digit increases in conversions that you can then take back to your boss and your clients.”
Smart Search is currently generally available as a SaaS search offering that is specialized in WordPress but can index and search data from anywhere. A plugin is available that acts as both a UI interface for the WYSIWYG experience, but also as the interface to WP Engine’s API for more advanced users interested in high customization, the company said. The AI-Powered Hybrid Search is in beta and available only to WP Engine customers on premium accounts.
