Search suggestions & improvements?

Hi All,

For fun I’m playing around with the default search functionality. I’ve populated the site with a few thousand posts and tried searching.

At first I thought maybe come up with a text widget giving users search advice such as the following.

1. Try searching with and without special characters.

“Eric’s Website” != “Erics Website”

2. Try using a shorter key word.

“Site” is in “website”, but “websites” is not in “website”.

“Free” or “drugs” will return many results but “free drugs” may return none.

3. Notice that it breaks up key words and looks inside of them.

“Erics site” will find “Erics Website”

Then my second thought was this is just too cumbersome for average users. I looked at the various search related plugins and didn’t see a free option that helped much. Any suggestions?

My third thought was maybe I should try to write my own search plugin using some of the default functionality of MySQL.

Thoughts?