Opensolr Search

Opensolr Search replaces WordPress’s default search with a powerful, hosted Apache Solr search engine. It combines traditional keyword search with AI-powered vector search for dramatically better relevance.

Key Features:

• Hybrid Search — combines keyword matching (BM25) with semantic vector search (1024-dim embeddings) for the best of both worlds
• Faceted Navigation — filter results by category, price range, date, custom fields, and hierarchical taxonomies
• AI Hints — streaming AI-generated answers above search results, powered by RAG
• AI Reader — full-screen AI summary of any search result
• Autocomplete — real-time search suggestions with query history and Solr results
• WooCommerce Support — index products with prices, categories, SKUs, and structured data
• Two Indexing Methods — Web Crawler (automatic) and Data Ingestion API (push from WordPress)
• Search Analytics — track queries, clicks, CTR, no-results queries, and visitor patterns
• Query Elevation — pin or exclude specific results for any query
• Persistent Filters — admin-defined include/exclude filters applied to every search
• Multilingual — automatic locale filtering for WPML and Polylang sites
• Dark Theme — built-in dark mode for the search page
• Embeddable — use native search or embed the Opensolr hosted search widget

How It Works:

1. Sign up at opensolr.com and get your API key
2. Install the plugin and enter your credentials
3. Create a search index or connect to an existing one
4. Configure your sitemap and start the web crawler
5. Your search page is live at /opensolr-search

The plugin generates a complete sitemap, injects meta tags for the crawler to extract, and provides a full search experience with zero load on your WordPress server — all search queries go directly to the Opensolr cloud.

Requirements:

• An Opensolr account (free tier available)
• PHP 8.1 or higher
• WordPress 6.0 or higher

External services

This plugin depends on several online services operated by Opensolr (https://opensolr.com) to provide hosted search. You must have an Opensolr account; all indexing and search queries flow through these services. The service is required for core plugin functionality and cannot be self-hosted.

Service provider

• Opensolr — hosted Solr search cloud and AI API
• Privacy policy: https://opensolr.com/learn/privacy-policy
• Terms of service: https://opensolr.com/learn/terms-of-service
• Account signup (free tier available): https://opensolr.com/register

Endpoints the plugin contacts

• https://opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/* — account management, index create/reload, config upload, sitemap registration, elevation toggle, crawl start/stop/stats. Called from WordPress admin (not from visitors’ browsers).
• https://api.opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/ingest — Data Ingestion API: pushes your post content + metadata to the search index. Called from the WordPress site (cron worker and the real-time sync on post save/delete), never from visitors.
• https://api.opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/embed — generates a 1024-dim semantic embedding for the current search query (AI/hybrid search path only). Called from the WordPress site on every AI/hybrid search.
• https://api.opensolr.com/solr_manager/api/ai_summary — streams the AI Hints / AI Reader answer. Called from the WordPress site only when the admin has enabled those features.
• https://<your-solr-host>.solrcluster.com/solr/<your-index>/select — the Solr search request itself (host provided by Opensolr when you create an index). Called from the WordPress site on every search.
• https://search.opensolr.com/embed.js — loaded ONLY if the admin switches Search Mode to “Embeddable”. In Native mode (the default), this script is never loaded.

Data sent to these services

• Your Opensolr email + API key (authentication).
• Your site’s host name (meta_domain).
• For ingestion: post titles, content, URL, excerpt, author display name, taxonomy terms, publish dates, WooCommerce price + category + SKU, featured-image URL. Only for the post types you explicitly enable in the plugin settings. Never includes user login data, email addresses, or passwords.
• For search: the search query string, the active facet filters, pagination position.
• For AI features (when enabled): the search query plus the top 4 result snippets, so the AI can compose an answer from your own content.
• For click tracking (when enabled): the clicked result URL, title, position, the search query, and a SHA-256 hash of the visitor’s IP (never the raw IP). Analytics can be disabled from the plugin’s Search Display settings.

No data is shared with any third party — all traffic goes only to opensolr.com / api.opensolr.com / *.solrcluster.com (and only to search.opensolr.com if you explicitly enable Embeddable mode).