Based on what I could figure out so far, the new and improved WP search will indeed sort by relevance (boy did that take them long), but as far as I can tell, it’ll only search post titles and post content.
That’s a bit of a restriction compared to Relevanssi, which can search author names, custom fields, taxonomy terms and so on, not to mention Relevanssi Premium, which can search user profiles and taxonomy term pages as well.
Also, Relevanssi offers possibilities for customization the default search may or may not offer. Looks like the WP search will order the posts in a particular way, but with Relevanssi, you can adjust the weights to get the ordering you want to get.
As far as I can tell, for the most basic needs, the WordPress default search will be sufficient; everybody isn’t going to need to Relevanssi. For more advanced use cases, Relevanssi will still be useful.
himm.. i agree. it took soo long for them to adapt it. would there be any collaboration between you and them to add relevanssi to the core?
Nobody has asked me, and I don’t think that’s going to happen anyway – Relevanssi is too heavy, requires too much DB space and is too complicated to be included as a default search engine.
