Type something into your site’s search box and Fetchie answers with a ranked list: the most relevant match first, each result showing why it matched. This page explains what visitors see, how the ranking thinks, and what the highlighted jump links do — plus a few honest notes about where the edges are.
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Ranked, Not Reverse-Chronological
WordPress’s built-in search orders results by date, which is why the right page so often sits on page three. Fetchie ranks by relevance instead:
- Results that match your search terms more often score higher
- Matches in a title count for more than matches buried in body text
- On WooCommerce sites, products get a nudge above blog posts about products, and pages sit slightly above posts
The result: searching a product name finds the product, not the announcement post from 2021.
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Anatomy of a Result
Each result is built the way search engines have taught everyone to read:
- Title — a link to the page
- Breadcrumbs — the page’s place on your site, prettified from its address (up to the last four levels, nearest first reads best). Homepage-level results skip this line. You can style it under Results appearance
- Snippet — the passage of the page where the search terms actually matched, with each matched word highlighted
When a page matches in more than one place, up to two extra passages appear beneath the snippet, in the order they occur on the page, each one a link.
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Jump Links: Straight to the Passage
The highlighted words in a snippet aren’t just decoration — they’re links. Click one and the browser opens the page, scrolls to that exact passage, and highlights it in your brand’s accent colour (set in Tracksies > Designer, Colours tab). The extra passages work the same way: each link lands on its own spot on the page.
This works through the browser’s text-fragment feature, and it’s worth knowing how it behaves at the edges:
- The link targets the exact text Fetchie indexed. If you’ve reworded that passage since it was last indexed, the browser can’t find it and opens the top of the page instead — a graceful miss, not an error. The next re-index (automatic within a day, or a manual rebuild) puts the link back on target.
- Older browsers without text-fragment support also open the top of the page. The visitor still gets where they’re going; they just scroll themselves.
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Pagination
Fetchie fetches up to 50 of the best matches per search and pages through them — 10 per page by default, adjustable in Search settings. The thinking is borrowed from the big search engines: nobody genuinely wants page six, they want a better query. If visitors regularly aren’t finding things, the Broad strictness mode (also in Search settings) is a better lever than more pages.
Flipping through pages counts as one search in your Insights, not one per page.
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When a Search Finds Nothing: Did You Mean
If a search finds nothing, Fetchie looks for the closest words in your site’s own copy, runs that search instead, and tells the visitor what it changed:
No results for jackte. Showing results for jacket instead.
When there are other close matches, up to two appear underneath as Also try: links, each running its own search.
How it decides:
- Only when nothing was found. A search that finds something is left as it was typed
- Small slips only. It corrects up to two words in a search. A word of four letters or fewer can be one letter out, and a longer word two
- The first three letters have to be right. “jackte” becomes “jacket”, but “jaket” isn’t corrected
- Numbers are left alone. A word with a digit in it, like a part number or a year, is always searched as typed. So are words under three letters
- Your words, not your reviewers’. Corrections come from your own content, never from words that only appear in reviews or comments
- Checked first. Fetchie only offers a correction it has already checked finds results
The original search is still logged as one that found nothing, so it stays on your Insights tab, where you can see the words visitors use.
Did you mean is on from the start. To switch it off, go to Tracksies > Settings > Features and turn off Did you mean.
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Language Notes
A few honest limits, so nothing surprises you:
- Fetchie is built for unaccented English at present. Words made only of the letters a to z, digits and apostrophes index and match exactly as you’d expect.
- Accented characters are not yet handled properly. Fetchie currently drops any character outside a to z rather than folding it to its base letter, so “café” indexes as “caf” and “naïve” splits into two short fragments. An accented word still finds itself, because the query is processed the same way, but it won’t match its unaccented spelling and the shortened fragments rank oddly. In practice this means French, German, Spanish and Vietnamese content with accents is not properly searchable yet. Accent folding is planned for a future release.
- Languages written without spaces between words, or in other scripts — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai — aren’t supported. Fetchie builds its index from space-separated words, and there’s no honest way to pretend otherwise.
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If Results Look Wrong
- A page missing from results usually means it isn’t indexed — check the Indexing page and the thin-content notice on the Index tab
- Too few results: try the Balanced or Broad strictness mode in Search settings
- A jump link landing at the top of a page: the passage’s wording changed since indexing — rebuild, or wait for the daily freshness pass
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Related
- Search settings — strictness modes and results per page
- Results appearance — plain list vs cards, breadcrumb styling
- Custom search templates — when you’ve built your own results layout