ElasticPress, our fast and flexible search solution for WordPress, continues to evolve with powerful new features that supercharge search. With the release of ElasticPress 5.3 and its companion plugin ElasticPress Labs 2.5, we’ve added AI-powered search capabilities and key improvements to the core plugin. These enhancements underscore our team’s commitment to delivering faster, more relevant, and future-forward search experiences for WordPress site owners and developers. They launch alongside other iterative improvements, including first-class Elementor support.
ElasticPress Labs 2.5: AI-Powered Search Enhancements
ElasticPress Labs is a companion plugin that brings more powerful features and advanced customizations to professional developers, often previewing capabilities before they’re fully ready and more easily accessible for our larger customer base.
In version 2.5, Labs is ushering in two capabilities powered by AI: generated search summaries and semantic (natural language) search. To enable these features, site owners will need to connect their own OpenAI API key, as the feature uses OpenAI’s model behind the scenes.
Smarter Search Results: Semantic Search with Natural Language Processing (NLP)
The introduction of semantic search in ElasticPress Labs 2.5 allows search queries to go beyond exact keyword matching, enabling a site’s search to find results based on meaning and context. This means ElasticPress will return relevant results even if the specific keywords and phrases don’t appear in the content.
Under the hood, ElasticPress uses OpenAI’s embeddings, adding embeddings data to all indexed content stored in Elastic, and translating each search query into a high-dimensional vector embedding. This means that search queries can now find results with similar meanings. For example, if you search for “car,” it will also find pages about “automobile” or “electric vehicle,” without having to manually add synonyms in the ElasticPress settings.
The result: smarter results that “understand” intent and a lower chance of a zero results search. Semantic, meaning-based search is the future norm for web searches, and this ElasticPress Labs release is a big step towards that future for our customers.
Of course, the new search algorithm is an opt-in feature, independent of search summaries. Semantic search is powerful but also comes with additional computational overhead and cost, and we want to avoid disrupting any heavily customized keyword-based search setups our customers already have in place, while also acknowledging that there are some applications where stricter keyword search may be preferred (e.g. searching a catalog).
Faster Answers: AI-Generated Search Summaries
The new AI search summaries feature uses generative AI to provide a concise, digestible answer at the top of the traditional list of search results. This capability helps searchers get the answers they’re looking for faster.
Our team has also baked in deep developer-layer customization with filters and hooks, supporting customizations and guardrails like integrating with tools like AWS Bedrock to prevent AI hallucinations or off-topic answers. These safeguards help ensure the summary stays on-message, factual, and safe.
A Preview of the Future of ElasticPress
Launching these capabilities in the Labs plugin allows our team to get these capabilities out to a more advanced customer sooner, while gathering feedback from real-world usage and refining the user experience before integration with the core ElasticPress plugin.
Even so, these features are far from an academic experiment; they’ve already been developed, tested, and deployed in collaboration with a global retail enterprise client, and are live on our own ElasticPress.io site.
ElasticPress 5.3: Elementor Support and Usability Improvements
Alongside support for the major Labs updates, ElasticPress 5.3 brings enhancements aimed at improving usability and compatibility for everyone.
Improved Elementor Compatibility. Better compatibility with Elementor-built sites, ensuring that advanced searches and filtering work seamlessly on content designed with the popular page builder.
Remodeled Features Page. The layout and design have been improved to help site administrators quickly understand which features are active and how they can be configured. Clear descriptions and a friendlier interface mean less time digging through settings and more confidence that search is tuned exactly as intended.
New Status Indicator. A new indicator in the WordPress admin bar provides at-a-glance insight into how ElasticPress was used to generate the content on the screen. It’s a small addition for more sophisticated site owners and developers
ElasticPress 5.3 also includes various under-the-hood fixes and optimizations contributed by our community. For a full list of changes, check out the release notes on GitHub.
Continuing Innovation & Looking Ahead
We expect AI-driven, natural-language search to become the standard, and we’re ensuring that ElasticPress leads the way in the WordPress space and provides a first-class solution for both enterprise clients and the wider ecosystem.
There’s much more to come as we integrate AI deeply into ElasticPress in the weeks and months ahead, as we advance its mission to deliver the most relevant results, as fast as possible, in the ways users find most intuitive.
Visit the ElasticPress site to learn more about our search solutions, keep up with the latest updates, and sign up for an easy, no-hassle free trial of ElasticPress.io to see how these innovations can supercharge your own WordPress site’s search experience.
