WordPress User Guide
1. Getting Started
Steps to follow
1. Create an account on Search IQ.
2. Copy the API key from Search IQ account, you can find it after selecting “Add domain” option.
3. Once you’ve created an account, go to your WordPress site and install Search IQ WordPress plugin.
4. You will be asked to enter your Search IQ API key.
5. Select the post types you want to search.
6. Index your posts and you are all set!
2. Indexing
2.1 Support Post Types, Custom Fields and Taxonomy
For content you want users to search on your site, we first need to index it. Search IQ allows you to index different post types along with its corresponding custom fields and taxonomy. With the interface below, you can decide what post types to index, what custom fields you want to filter out, what image in the post you want to use it as thumbnail. Search IQ only indexes Published posts and we allow you to filter out some posts using post IDs and url patterns.
For any newly added and updated posts, Search IQ will automatically detect and index them for you as long as the add/update is performed on the WordPress admin console. If you have a big site that you normally add and update your content through database directly, Search IQ provides 2 solutions for you to synchronize your changes. 1. Delta Sync button – Once click, it will detect the delta and synchronize the changes for you. 2. WordPress URL endpoint – An URL endpoint that you can hit to trigger delta sync once you are done with your database update. This URL endpoint is private to your own instance. If you need this feature enabled, please contact us at support(at)searchiq.com
2.2 Support PDF
Search IQ can index pdf content with a maximum size up to 10 MB each. If your pdf is associated with the post as attachment post type, it will be indexed in our end transparently. To improve the index accuracy, it is better if you make your pdf accessible (ie. provide us metadata like title, author, tags in the pdf). To do that, you can follow the video below.

3. Searching
3.1 Autocomplete and Result Page
If you have Search IQ set up properly, you should be able to see our autocomplete and search result page as below. If you don’t have search bar or autocomplete is not showing up in your search bar when you type, you can follow the “Setup Your Search Bar” section of this Guide to fix it. For autocomplete, we will show title, description, and thumbnail by default. If you are using our cross-domain feature, you will see the domain name as well. For details about cross-domain search, you can consult our “Cross Domain Search” Section below. Along with search result, there is a thumbnail. For the Free account, Search IQ will generate thumbnails in your server and serve from there. For our paid users, thumbnails are generated and hosted on Search IQ servers and deliver through CDN for better performance and user experience.
Autocomplete
Result Page
3.2 Match Option
By default, Search IQ will return search results based on both relevancy and recency. For a particular user query, our engine will first decide what posts are relevant and rank them based on relevancy score with recency taken into consideration. That is to say, if posts are similar in relevancy, we will rank the latest one higher.
In term of search relevancy, by default, Search IQ will use Board Match. That is one of the match options that try to boost up the search coverage by identifying content that has some terms matching the query regardless the word order and form. If you want the match to be more restrictive, you can try other matching options like “Full-term match” and “Phrase match”.
3.3 Fine-tune the result ranking

a) Field Weight
There are times you want to have a better control on the result ranking. For example, you want our search engine to give higher priority to the posts that have a title match than that of description match. To address this need, Search IQ provides you a field weight control page under “Documents” menu tab that you can go there to adjust the weight at the field level with 10 the highest weight and 0 if you want to ignore.
b) Control what posts to show by a user query
If you want to have even more fine-grained control like you want to show a post at the top of the search result for a particular user query, you can achieve this by adding the user query as a tag to your post and give “Tag” field a high weight like 9 to 10 and potentially lower the “Title” weight. This feature may not allow you to explicitly decide what rank #2, #3 and so on but it allows you to show a set of posts for a particular query.
c) Custom sorting (Upcoming!)
Search IQ will provide custom sorting feature shortly. With this feature, you can do the multi-field sorting. For example, if you want the matching content ranked by popularity first and recency next, you can do it in our UI given the popularity field and post date are indexed.
4. Search Analytics
4.1 Analytic Dashboard
Search IQ tracks what your user’s searches and clicks on your site and provides you analytic reports. To access your domain reports, login into Search IQ admin area, select your domain and click the Analytics on the left sidebar.
In the analytic dashboard, you can see # of searches, # of autocomplete click and # of result page click for your users within a time range you selected. For the Free account, you can examine the data for the last 24 hours. For larger time range, please consider upgrading your account. Search IQ provides both mobile and desktop analytics. You can select view them as a whole under “Traffic: All” or individually. The reports that our users use the most are “Top Search Terms” and “Top Terms with no result” sections. For the “Top Searches Terms” section, you can find out what kinds of content your users expecting from your site. So, can follow the demand to deliver the content your users are interested in. For “Top terms with no results” section, you can see if you are really missing out some opportunities there or some search terms do not appear in your content but you have written about it. For latter, you can use our “Synonym” section to fix it. For example, if user search on apparel with brand “A&F” but your product title and description only use the full name “Abercrombie”, it may not come up as a match. If you see “A&F” in your “Top terms with no results” section, you can go to Documents > Synonym Section and add the synonym “Abercrombie, A&F”. This way you are teaching our search engine that they are the same in meaning so next time when a user types A&F in the search query, Abercrombie products will be shown up in the search result.
4.2 Export the Data
Search IQ dashboard only shows you top 10 on each analytic section. If you want to obtain a bigger list up to 1000, you can click our “Export” button and download the report data in csv format.
5. Faceted Search
Faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into categories that let users drill into search results (or even skip searching entirely) by any value in any field. Each facet displayed also shows the number of hits within the search that match that category. Users can then “drill down” by applying specific constraints to the search results. User studies demonstrate that faceted search provides more effective information-seeking support to users than best-first search. Indeed, faceted search has become increasingly prevalent in online information access systems, particularly for e-commerce and site search. That is why many of the large websites like Amazon already provide this feature to their users.
Search IQ can help you to add this search feature on your site with ease. You can take the following steps to add a facet to your search bar.
- Select Facet Tab on your Admin Console
- Click Add Facet button
- Then a row with 4 fields will appear. First, you need to give the name on “Label” field. Next, you will decide what post type you want to add a facet. If your facet is common fields like author, category, date, and tag, you can leave the drop-down unchanged. If your facet is just applicable to product post type, you can select “product” from the post type list.
- After a post type is selected, the “Field” drop-down will be populated that just list you all the custom and taxonomy fields associated with the post type you selected. Select the field and give it a type then you are good to go.
- You can have 5 facets for a post type.
From the above screenshot, 4 facets are defined for all post types and I have the facet feature turned on for both autocomplete and search result page. Below you will see the facet shown up over post search.
If you are using WooCommerce, Search IQ will automatically set up the facets for you to get you started. However, we will just include some general WooCommerce fields like “date”, “product category”, “price” and “rating”. If you have defined some custom attributes like “Brand”, “Color” and etc. You need to add these facets yourself. See the example of our product facet below:
As some facets have a long list, Search IQ will figure that out for you and add a little search box on top of the long list facet to make it easier for your users. Apart from the autocomplete, you can turn on facet on result page as well. With grid layout, you can basically use this feature to create a catalog for your website. See an example below:
NOTE: Search IQ facet feature is still in beta. If you face any problem when you try to use it or you have some suggestions to make it better, please drop us an email.
6. Setup Your Search Bar
6.1 Integrate with Existing Search Bar
Search IQ will detect and see if your page has a search bar and associate our autocomplete widget to it. However, there are chances that we cannot detect your search bar correctly and you may not see the autocomplete appeared. If you come across this issue, you can inspect some properties from your search bar’s HTML code and fill up the info on our admin screen. Take the following search bar HTML snippet as an example.
<input type=”text” value=”Type keywords…” name=”q” id=”s” autocomplete=”off” class=”searchBox”>
You can see the search bar as an HTML form input element that has id and name. Enter the id’s value to the “Search box name” field and name’s value to “Search Query Parameter field” as follows:
6.2 Add a Search bar
If your website doesn’t have a search bar, you can follow the options below to add Search IQ’s search bar to your site.
a. Use Search Widget
- Select the widget option under appearance in your WordPress dashboard.
- Grab the “Search IQ search box” from the widgets menu.
- Drag and drop it wherever you want it on your site like a sidebar.
- It will automatically install on your site.
Note: In this widget, you can select which post type(s) you want your search bar show. With this capability, you can create a search bar just for your post, product or other entities.
b. Menu Icon
- Go into Search IQ options.
- Select the menu where you would like the icon to be (header, footer, main, etc.).
- Finally, select save. The icon will show automatically at the end of the menu you have chosen.
c. Shortcode
Add the following shortcode anywhere on the page, post, custom post type or widget.
This shortcode can have the following options:
- type – Accepted values: “search-bar” or “icon”. “search-bar” will show regular text box for search. “icon” will show a clickable search icon for search. Clicking the icon will open a search-bar.
- post-type: any built-in or custom post type that you have indexed. By default, it includes all post types you index.
- placeholder: default text that you want to show in the search box
- width: it can accept any integer value which will be used to set the width of the search box. The integer value may be suffixed by % or px. If the value is added without suffix it will by default take px as the suffix. Default width is 100% of the parent element and for icon it is 300px.
- placement: “left” or “right”
Example shortcode with options:
“<siq_searchbox type=”icon” placeholder=”Search here” post-types=”post,product” width=”500″ placement=”right”>”
7. Customization

7.1 Autocomplete Customization
Steps to follow:
1. Go to Search IQ WordPress plugin.
2. Select Autocomplete tab.
3. Customize the fields as per your requirements.
4. If there is no customization for any specific element you are looking for, please watch the video above.
7.2 Result Page Customization
Steps to follow:
1. Go to Search IQ WordPress plugin.
2. Select Results Page tab.
3. Customize the fields as per your requirements.
4. If there is no customization for any specific element you are looking for, please watch the video above.
7.3 Custom CSS Override
Steps to follow:
1. Go to Search IQ WordPress plugin.
2. Select Options tab.
3. Add CSS rules to override in Custom CSS text area.
4. Click Save. Its done!