SearchUs – Site Search for WordPress and WooCommerce

Description

Replace WordPress’s default search with a powerful site search plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce. SearchUs helps visitors quickly find pages, posts, WooCommerce products, images, videos, PDFs, documents, audio, and other media with fast, relevance-ranked results.

SearchUs delivers a better search experience with customizable results, search intent, synonyms, Smart 404 recovery, and flexible search pages. WooCommerce shoppers can filter products, select variations, and buy from search results—helping them find what they need faster with fewer clicks.

Key Features

Better WordPress Search
Replace WordPress’s built-in search with fast, relevance-ranked site search across pages, posts, WooCommerce products, images, videos, PDFs, documents, audio, and other indexed content. Show results on a dedicated search page with tabs such as All, Products, Images, Videos, Documents, and Audio; choose list or grid layouts while keeping your site’s header and footer.

WooCommerce Search Built for Shopping
Turn product search into a shopping experience. Index your catalog, let customers filter by category, price, brand, color, size, and other attributes, and understand natural-language searches like “under $100.” Shoppers can select color, size, and other options on variable products and use Buy Now to cart or checkout without opening the product page first. Map shopper language (for example “XXL” or “sneakers”) to real variation options and intent synonyms so the right products rank and preselect. Optional AI Assist can draft those synonym and variation-alias maps for you.

Scoped Search Embeds
Place search boxes anywhere with a shortcode and choose exactly what visitors can search—products, pages, posts, images, videos, documents, audio, selected categories, or your entire site. Ideal for shop pages, landing pages, and page builders.

Search Analytics & Content Gaps
See what visitors are searching for—including queries that return zero results—so you can improve your site instead of guessing. Spot missing products or pages to create, decide which synonym maps to add, and focus ranking and content work where shoppers actually look. Analytics stay on your WordPress site when enabled.

Search Intent & Synonyms
Understand what visitors mean—not just what they type. Built-in intent and synonym matching help connect searches like “lead gen” with content about “lead generation.”

“Did You Mean?” Suggestions
Reduce failed searches by suggesting better terms when no matching results are found.

Fully Customizable Search Ranking
Control how results are ranked by adjusting the importance of titles, headings, content, URLs, media, products, pages, posts, and more. Promote your most important content to the top of search results.

Automatic Search Indexing
Keep your search index up to date by automatically detecting content changes, crawling your sitemap, or performing a full site scan.

Promote Important Content
Feature announcements, products, promotions, or key pages by inserting promoted results into search results.

Secure & Reliable
Protect your search experience with settings locking, plan-tier rate protection, and automated bot filtering to reduce abusive or junk search traffic before it consumes your usage.

Built to Scale
Whether your site has dozens of pages or hundreds of thousands of products, SearchUs scales with your content while keeping WordPress search fast, organized, and easy to use.

Smart 404 Recovery
Recover visitors before they leave by replacing dead-end 404 pages with relevant pages, posts, products, or media based on the requested URL.

Options

Use the SearchUs search results page, or keep your theme’s default WordPress search template while benefiting from SearchUs indexing and relevance ranking.

Choose which post types, products, and media types to index. Configure layouts, ranking, excerpts, results per page, Buy Now destination, excluded URLs, excluded page sections, and more from one settings area.

Requires PHP 7.4 or later.

After license activation, SearchUs securely communicates with the FunnelWon service for indexing, search queries, licensing, and plan usage. Free plans include “Search powered by FunnelWon” attribution where applicable. Paid plans can remove attribution based on license level. SearchUs does not include third-party advertising or behavioral tracking.

External services

This plugin connects to FunnelWon SearchUs (hosted API and account dashboard at https://searchus.io). Use of the service is subject to our Terms and Privacy (links below).

When data is sent

• License activation / validation – When you enter or refresh an API key (and on periodic checks the plugin performs).
• Indexing – When you run a full reindex, delta/index push, or auto-crawl sends content to build or update the remote index.
• Visitor search – After activation, each real visitor search counts toward the monthly search allowance (unless blocked locally as junk; see below). The service ranks a search when this site does not already have that result saved. A repeat search can be answered from the saved result on the site and still counts.
• Usage and configuration – When the admin loads usage, reindex eligibility, or optional cloud settings backup/sync features you use.

What is sent (summary)

• Site URL, API key, plugin version, site identifier, and technical headers needed for authentication and plan routing.
• Content and metadata you enable for indexing (titles, body areas, headings, product fields, media alt text, filenames, etc.).
• Visitor search query text for live search (not used for third-party advertising).
• Aggregated usage for quotas (e.g. query counts, indexed URL counts, reindex allowance).

What stays on your server

• Optional SearchUs analytics (if enabled) is stored in your WordPress database only.
• Query guard (core/query-guard.php) evaluates queries locally and does not send obvious bot/scanner probes to the API or third parties.
• A search result cache (transients) may store a recent result on the site for speed. A later search for the same text can use that saved result. It still counts as a visitor search. The cache is not shared with advertisers.

Legal

• Terms of Service: https://searchus.io/tos/
• Privacy Policy: https://searchus.io/privacy/

For more detail, see the Privacy section below and the in-plugin FAQ.

Privacy

Licensing and API

When the plugin contacts FunnelWon’s (SearchUs) services—for license validation, indexing, search results, or configuration sync—it may send your site URL, API key (if you have entered one), plugin version, and other technical data needed to operate the service. Your site URL is used among other things to apply your plan and allowed environments (for example production, staging, and development URLs permitted under your license). After you complete license activation, indexing sends the content and metadata described in the plugin and settings (e.g. pages, posts, products). Each visitor search counts toward the monthly search allowance. Query text is sent when the site does not already have that result saved; a repeat answered from the saved result still counts. Before activation, those flows are not used for front-end ?s= requests.

Support (information you choose to share)

If you contact support, we may ask you to share diagnostic details so we can reproduce issues and spot conflicts—for example your hosting provider or environment, active WordPress theme (name and version), and list of active plugins, often by pasting Tools → Site Health → Info from your admin. You decide what to send; we use it only to troubleshoot (including cache and plugin conflicts) and improve compatibility. Unless a future feature clearly discloses it and asks for consent, the plugin does not automatically upload your theme or full plugin list to us solely for support.

What the plugin sends automatically (no separate ad or marketing profile)

• Site identity and licensing: your site URL (and any staging/dev URLs your license allows), API key if you enter one, plugin version, and related technical fields so we can validate the license, apply plan limits, and route API requests.
• Indexing: text and metadata from the content types you enable (e.g. titles, excerpts, body areas, headings, product fields, image alt text, file names)—only what is needed to build and update the search index.
• Search: each visitor search counts toward the plan’s monthly search allowance once license activation is complete. The service ranks the search when the site does not already have that result saved. A repeat can be answered from the saved result on the site and still counts. Until an API key is stored after activation, front-end ?s= search uses WordPress’s built-in search and is not sent to SearchUs. Queries are not used for third-party advertising.
• Optional in-plugin analytics (if you turn it on): aggregated search and click metrics stored on your WordPress site in its database, as described in settings. A first-party cookie may be used for deduplication. This analytics data is not sent to FunnelWon for advertising; it stays on your server unless a future feature clearly says otherwise.

What we do not do

• We do not sell your site URL, license details, index payloads, search queries, or support diagnostics to third parties for advertising or to build ad profiles.
• The plugin does not load third-party advertising or behavioral-tracking scripts for FunnelWon’s benefit.
• We do not automatically upload your theme name, plugin list, or Site Health dump—only what you choose to send if you contact support.

Personal data (PII) in plain language

SearchUs is not designed to collect visitor identities for marketing. However, search queries can contain anything a visitor types, and indexed content may include names, emails, or other data you published on the site—those flows are part of normal search and indexing, not a separate “PII harvesting” feature. If you are a data controller for your site’s visitors, you should describe SearchUs in your privacy policy (and comply with applicable law). FunnelWon’s own handling of data received through the service is described in our policies below.

Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Use of the hosted SearchUs service is governed by our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy on the SearchSaaS dashboard site:

• Terms of Service: https://searchus.io/tos/
• Privacy Policy: https://searchus.io/privacy/

For retention, security, legal bases, subprocessors, and other details, see the Privacy Policy link above. That policy governs FunnelWon / SearchUs as the service provider; your site still needs its own policy where required. The Privacy Policy is also published at https://funnelwon.com/privacy/ for convenience.

Third-party libraries

The plugin bundles Driver.js (https://github.com/kamranahmedse/driver.js) under the MIT License for the in-admin setup walkthrough. Source is included under admin/vendor/driver/.

Technical details