Search runs on the words that matter — anything longer than two letters — and matches an article containing any of them, then ranks what it found:

the whole phrase in the title scores highest;
a word in the title beats one in the keywords, which beats one in the excerpt, which beats one in the body;
an article containing every word beats one containing some;
a body mention counts less the more times it repeats, because an article that says "refund" forty times is longer, not better;
ties go to the more-read article.

This matters more than it sounds. WordPress's own search requires every word, so "how do I get a refund on my order" matches nothing at all unless some article happens to contain the word "my".

Weak matches are dropped rather than shown. A single passing mention is not an answer, and a bad suggestion reads as "we did not understand you". Password-protected articles are left out of search altogether, and members-only ones are found by their title and keywords only (see above).

Pressing Enter in the search box opens your theme's search results page, and that page lists the same ranked answers, best first. When none is a good enough answer, that page shows what WordPress's own search finds instead, without members-only articles. A search of the whole site, from your theme's own search box, is left to WordPress.

The search box works from the keyboard and with a screen reader. The arrow keys move through the answers and Enter opens one; Escape closes the list, and so does moving on from the box. How many answers there are is read out as they appear, and so is "Nothing matched", which comes with a link to the form. Every search box on a page works, so [trasl_help_search] in a header and the help centre's own box can sit on the same page.

Unanswered searches#

The dashboard lists what people searched for and did not find in the last 30 days, most frequent first. It is the list of articles to write next, and each search has a Write an article link that starts one with the search as its title. A search counts once the visitor has stopped typing, or when they press Enter; the letters typed on the way do not. The same visitor searching for the same thing again within the hour counts once, so the list is about how many people asked.

Only the words are kept, in lower case, and nothing about who searched. They are kept as typed otherwise, so a search for a coupon code such as 30%BFRIDAY or for size <10 is listed whole; anything shaped like an HTML tag is taken out. A search listed by version 1.10.0 or earlier stays as it was kept then. A search containing an email address or a link is never kept. The list holds the 200 most recent searches, and Clear the list empties it.

A search made by pressing Enter is listed as typed too, quotes and all, so Can't log in from the box and from Enter is one row. Version 1.10.1 kept one made with Enter with a backslash before each quote (can\'t log in), as a second row; those are now listed as one row with the words as typed, and its count is the larger of the two, since somebody who waited for the box and then pressed Enter was counted in both. Pressing Enter also ranks the articles by the words as typed, so won't finds an article that says "won't".