Site search

Radius gives visitors three ways to search your site. You pick the mix under Settings → Search, and you can change it at any time without touching your theme.

	What visitors see	Best for
Database search	Type, press Enter, get a results page	Most sites. Nothing to set up
Results while typing	A dropdown of matches appears as they type	Any site. Works with either engine
Index search	Same as above, but answered from a prebuilt index	Large sites, or sites with a lot of searching

Results while typing is a display option, not a separate engine. It works with database search and with index search.

Choosing an engine

Database is the default. Every search reads your posts, products and pages straight from the database. Results are always up to date, and there is nothing to build or maintain.

Index builds a word index of your content ahead of time and answers from that. A search never touches the database, so a thousand visitors searching at once cost your database nothing. The index updates itself whenever you save, publish, unpublish or delete something.

Stay on Database unless one of these is true:

• You have thousands of posts or products and search has started to feel slow.
• Search is busy: a store where most visitors use the search box, say.
• Your host limits database load and you are hitting that limit.

Switching is safe

If the index has not been built yet, or cannot be read, Radius quietly uses database search instead. Visitors always get results.

Turning on index search

1. Go to Settings → Search.
2. Set Search engine to Index.
3. Click Save settings.

The index is built as you save. A few thousand items take a few seconds. The message at the top of the screen confirms how many items were indexed, and the Search status card below the form shows the details.

That is all. From now on the index keeps itself current as you edit.

The settings

Field	Default	What it does
Search engine	Database	Where answers come from. See Choosing an engine
Show results while typing	on	The live dropdown under search boxes. Pressing Enter still opens the full results
Start after this many characters	2	Live results wait until this much has been typed
Results per group while typing	5	How many products, posts and pages the dropdown shows before "See all"
Search blog posts	on	Include posts. Has no effect while the Blog module is off
Search products	on	Include products. Has no effect while the Shop module is off
Search pages	on	Include your CMS pages
Site-wide results page at /search	on	One page listing matches from everything above
Live searches allowed per visitor per minute	60	Stops scripts from flooding the search. A person typing uses a handful
Remember live results for (seconds)	60	Database engine only. Repeated searches skip the database

Already have a page at /search?

The results page takes over the address /search. If you built your own page with that slug, turn off Site-wide results page at /search to keep yours.

The Search status card

Below the settings form, the card lists each kind of content with:

• Searchable: whether it is switched on above.
• Index: Ready, or Not built, using database if the index is missing.
• Items: how many entries the index holds.
• Size: disk space used.
• Last change: when the index was last built or updated.

Rebuild index now

You do not normally need this, because the index follows your edits. Use it when content changed outside the admin panel:

• after importing posts or products directly into the database
• after restoring a database backup
• after changing your site's address (domain)
• if a result looks out of date

On very large sites the rebuild can take longer than your host allows for one page load. Run it from the command line instead, where there is no time limit:

php artisan search:rebuild

See Artisan commands.

Where visitors search

The search boxes in your theme

Both bundled themes have search boxes that show live results:

• Default theme: the search field on the blog page and on the shop page.
• Storefront theme: the search bar in the header (products) and the search field on the blog page.

Pressing Enter still goes to the blog or shop listing, filtered by what was typed, the same as before.

The Search widget

In the builder, the Search widget has two settings for this:

• Search in: Whole site, Blog posts or Products. Whole site sends visitors to the /search results page.
• Results while typing: Use the site setting, or Off for this box for a box where a dropdown would get in the way.

The /search page

yoursite.com/search?q=coffee lists matches from every searchable kind of content, a few of each, with a See all link per group. Visitors can also filter to just one kind.

Results pages are marked noindex, so search engines do not index them.

What gets searched

Content	Matched on
Posts	Title, excerpt, tags, category and the post body
Products	Name, SKU, variant SKUs, categories, short description and description
Pages	Title and page content

A match in a title ranks above a match in body text.

Only content the public can see is searchable: drafts never appear. Scheduled posts appear from their publish time. With index search, that happens automatically at the right moment.

Database and index search differ slightly

Index search also looks inside post tags, product descriptions and variant SKUs, and matches the start of the last word typed ("espr" finds "espresso"). It ignores accents ("cafe" finds "café"). Database search matches any part of a word, but only in the main fields.

Troubleshooting

The dropdown never appears. Check Show results while typing is on. If you use a third-party theme, its search boxes need a small change to support live results. Send its author to the developer guide.

A new product does not show up with index search. Check it is Published. If it was added by an import rather than the admin panel, click Rebuild index now.

Saving the settings said the index could not be built. Search keeps using the database, so nothing is broken. The usual cause is that the web server cannot write to storage/app/search-index. Fix the folder permissions, or run php artisan search:rebuild to see the full error.

Prices in the dropdown are out of date. Index search stores the price when a product is saved. A sale that starts or ends on a date does not save the product, so its dropdown price can lag until the next save or rebuild. The product page and shop listing always show the live price. If the scheduler cron entry is set up, Radius rebuilds the index every night at 03:30, which catches these.