Want to offer your users more accurate search results for your WordPress websites and content? We will show you how to install and set up the Lift WordPress plugin for Amazon CloudSearch to improve your default WordPress search functionality. You will learn how to get better search relevancy, with faceting and search filters for post types and date ranges. Lift integrates with your existing Wordpress theme, with no need for customization, and runs on top of your WordPress installation with no additional servers, services or hosting configuration required. Presenters: Chris Scott, Voce Communications Jon Handler, Solution Architect, Amazon CloudSearch

1. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Delivering Great Search For Your
WordPress Content
Jon Handler, Amazon CloudSearch Solution Architect
Chris Scott, Vice President, Platforms Development

2. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Today’s Webinar
! Housekeeping
! Introduction to Amazon CloudSearch
• Jon Handler, CloudSearch Solution Architect
! Using the Lift plugin with WordPress
• Chris Scott, Vice President, Platforms Development

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What is Search
Shoes

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Amazon CloudSearch
! Pay for infrastructure you need when you need it
! Low cost
! No need to guess capacity
! Experiment fast with low risk
! We do the undifferentiated heavy lifting
! Go global in minutes

5. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
AGENDA!
• Who is the Voce Platforms team?
• Why do we need a better search for WordPress?
• How we developed Lift for WordPress
• Why we chose Amazon CloudSearch
• How Lift works
• Installing and using the Lift plugin
• Lift in the wild

6. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
WHO WE ARE!
• Developers and designers
• We build publishing systems
• http://voceplatforms.com

7. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
WHY A BETTER SEARCH?!
WORDPRESS SEARCH IS BASIC, LIMITED
• A simple LIKE query on the post title and content
• No ranking or faceting
• Only posts and pages are searched (and with equal
priority)

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
WHY A BETTER SEARCH?!
OUR CLIENTS WANTED MORE
• Better relevance
• Custom post type support
• Ranking and faceting

9. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
HOW WE DEVELOPED LIFT!
• Started with a functional spec based on client needs
• Created a technical spec to outline the
implementation details
• Started coding on Monday at a team offsite and
finished on Friday for an initial release
• Custom PHP, JS, CSS

10. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
WHY AMAZON CLOUDSEARCH?!
• Doesn’t require us or our clients to host their own
search instances – fully managed
• Dynamic scalability for data/query traffic
• CloudSearch has an easy API for both search and
configuration
• Relevancy was good out of the box with the ability to
fine tune if needed

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
HOW IT WORKS!
PLUGIN INITIALIZATION
• A search domain is created via the configuration API
• A default document schema is added
• A WP_Cron job is added to queue all posts for
submission via the document service API

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
HOW IT WORKS!
DEFAULT DOCUMENT SCHEMA
Field Type Facet Result Search
----------------------- ------- ------------- ------ -------------
blog_id uint Yes (default) Yes Yes (default)
site_id uint Yes (default) Yes Yes (default)
id uint Yes (default) No Yes (default)
post_author uint Yes (default) No Yes (default)
post_author_name text No Yes Yes (default)
taxonomy_category_id literal Yes No No
taxonomy_category_label text No No Yes (default)
post_content text No No Yes (default)
post_date_gmt uint Yes (default) No Yes (default)
post_status literal Yes No No
post_title text No Yes Yes (default)
post_type literal Yes No Yes
taxonomy_post_tag_id literal Yes No No
taxonomy_post_tag_label text No No Yes (default)

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
HOW IT WORKS!
DOCUMENT SUBMISSION
• Documents are batched
• Batches use two queues (active and closed) to
prevent race conditions
• Batches are run via WP_Cron
• Document submission errors will be retried

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
HOW IT WORKS!
SEARCHING
• Hooks into WP_Query to check for a search
• Builds a boolean query from the WP_Query
• Replaces WP_Query results with CloudSearch
results
• This is all transparent to WordPress

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
INSTALLATION!

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
CONFIGURATION!

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
CONFIGURATION!

18. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
CONFIGURATION!

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
DASHBOARD!

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
LIFT IN USE!
BIG TEN NETWORK
• A large number of pages along with continually added
post content
• Not yet live in production so this is a demo of a
subset of their content
• ~6K documents using 1 small instance

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
BTN.COM – STANDARD SEARCH!

23. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
BTN.COM – LIFT SEARCH!

24. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
BTN.COM – LIFT FILTERS!

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01. WELCOME! MIKE MANUEL
GENERAL MANAGER
VOCE CONNECT
LIFT SEARCH WIDGET!

26. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Do You Want Search With That?
! Build your own – database, home-rolled, site search
! Open source
! Legacy enterprise search

27. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Search Challenges
! Complex, expertise required
! Costly, often with up-front expenditure
! Long time to market, innovation and experimentation are
slowed
! Operational overhead is undifferentiated work

28. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

29. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon CloudSearch Architecture
DNS / Load Balancing
Search API Console
SEARCH SERVICE
Doc
Svc API
Command
Line Tools
Console
DOCUMENT SERVICE
AWS Query
Config
API
Command
Line Tools
Console
CONFIG SERVICE
Search Domain

30. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
CloudSearch Features
! Free text, structured data, Boolean search
! Customizable relevance ranking
! Faceting
! Fielded and Range search
! Alphabetic or numeric sorting
! Field weighting
! Visually compare rank expressions
! Reporting (zero result queries, top results, etc.)

31. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Resources and Q&A
! Amazon CloudSearch Overview Page
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/
• 30 Day Free Trial; FAQs; Community Forum; Tutorial
• Introducing Amazon CloudSearch (Features)
• Building a Search Application Using Amazon CloudSearch
! Lift Search information: http://getliftsearch.com/
! Lift Search plugin download:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/lift-search/
! Github page for feedback:
https://github.com/voceconnect/lift-search/issues

32. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Thank You!
Jon Handler / handler@amazon.com
Chris Scott / cscott@voceconnect.com