Featured / Introducing Lift Search for WordPress
Introducing Lift Search for WordPress
I’m excited to announce the release of a WordPress plugin our team developed to help better the search experience of WordPress-based sites — Lift Search for WordPress.
What is Lift?
Lift is a plugin for WordPress that leverages the search index power of Amazon CloudSearch to improve your WordPress-powered site’s search.
Why create Lift?
If you’re familiar with implementing WordPress as a content platform, you may also be familiar with how out of the box WordPress search doesn’t always fit the needs. I can say that for us, we solved search in a case-by-case way. Sometimes it was using out of the box WordPress search. Sometimes we’d use Sphinx. Other times, Solr or Google Custom Search. Each had their plusses and minuses, but I was never happy with the fact that we never really came to the table with what we felt was a best-case solution.
We liked what we saw with Amazon CloudSearch, but there were not any WordPress plugins that could easily integrate indexing and search. That’s where Lift comes in.
Lift is a search product that’s the result of our team’s combined experience with a wide range of large-scale WordPress projects. We’re releasing that back to the community to hopefully help those feeling the same pains we did.
Why use Lift?
We are huge believers in the power of this plugin. We have created this for those who have outgrown the capabilities of built-in WordPress search and would like to retain control over things like indexing and results presentation. If you’re looking at options for search, take a look through Lift’s website as well as the documentation
A few things to note:
- Lift relies on Amazon’s CloudSearch service for true content indexing rather than wildcard database queries.
- Lift does not rely on any services to run server-side and can be leveraged on any web host.
- Lift is built with flexibility in mind as we needed this to work for a variety of projects across a variety of interfaces. Its beauty is in its simplicity.
We hope this can be helpful for others in the community. If you have thoughts, we’d love to hear them!
