I totally forgot to add a search box in this new theme when I started using it. After finished adding it this morning, I though that it would be great if users can have highlighted search keywords when using search function in WordPress. Most of themes out there just put the_excerpt() tag in archive and search template and I think it is not really effecient when dealing with keywords searching (that explains why I always use the_content() in those template).

So I Googled around, to find out that there is already a great plugin on highlighting search keywords, called Search Unleashed. In fact, it does more than that.

To summarize things up:

Highlighted search for blog posts, with excerpt and also comments!

Search highlighting and information when coming from Search Engine. Try it here and click the first result.

The search phrases/keywords and kept in a log for you to track from time to time. I really love this.

You can change the highlight colors, up to 5 colors.

and many other features!

Notes

Read the plugin’s original post for full features listing and instructions.

This is a good plugin for blogs with lots of contents regarding review and such. There are plenty of options in the plugin’s options page in your dashboard (Manage > Search Unleashed). I recommend you to use ‘Full text with logical operations’ mode for a much efficient search result. Make sure you re-index all posts and comments there too.

A quick comment - It would be good to have an option to ‘remove all highlights’ especially when visitors are coming from the search engine.

Try this plugin out for a better search in your wordpress blog.