What is Search with Typesense?

Codemanas has released the plugin Search with Typesense which is officially recommended by the typesense.org . The plugin turbocharges your sites search functionality with Typesense providing search-as-you-type experience.

Before we dive into the plugin details, let’s discuss what is Typesense?

“Typesense is an open-source, typo-tolerant search engine optimized for instant (typically sub-50ms) search-as-you-type experiences and developer productivity.”

If you’ve heard about ElasticSearch or Algolia, a good way to think about Typesense is that it is:

1. An open source alternative to Algolia, with some key quirks solved and

2. An easier-to-use batteries-included alternative to ElasticSearch

If you need more information:

https://typesense.org/docs/overview/what-is-typesense.html

https://typesense.org/docs/overview/why-typesense.html

https://typesense.org/docs/overview/features.html

https://typesense.org/docs/overview/comparison-with-alternatives.html

What is Typesense Cloud?

You need to host/save your WordPress data somewhere for Typesense to communicate with and the place where data is hosted is Typsense Cloud.

Typesense Cloud is the hosted Search-as-a-Service(SaaS) version for Typesense which is lightning fast and globally distributed. It works like a CDN, but for Search. Deploy nodes around the world, closest to your users, to provide them an ultra-fast search experience.

You can deploy Typesnese cluster in just few minutes.

Typesense Cloud is also provided locally for development purposes.

What does our plugin do?

Search with Typesense acts as bridge between your WordPress site and Typsense search engine.

After setting up the API keys provided by the Typesnse Cloud, our plugin indexes/pushes Posts and Pages ( also index custom post types) data to the cloud with few clicks. Initial indexing may take time depending upon the number of posts or pages.

After that, the plugin works automatically on default search provided by WordPress.

What does the plugin provides?

Search with Typesense provides two types of search functionality:

1. Autocomplete search

Autocomplete search provides the instant drop-down list of search results as you type. You can replace all WordPress search forms to provide a quick intuitive search form that users can get instant results. By default it hijack the WordPress search and the plugin also provides shortcode to implement it.

Demo here: https://typesense.codemanas.com/autocomplete-with-typesense/

Usage: https://codemanas.github.io/cm-typesense-docs/shortcode/#shortcode

2. Instant search:

Instant search provides the list of all the data to be searched and as you type the data are filtered instantly as you type. Moreover it provides filtering/facets and sorting options. You have to use shortcode to implement it.

Demo here: https://typesense.codemanas.com/instant-search/

Usage: https://codemanas.github.io/cm-typesense-docs/shortcode/#autocomplete