Improved Plugin Search
One of the biggest problems and most frequent complaints we’ve had with the WordPress.org Plugins Directory is the horrible, horrible search results.
No longer. We’re now using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power search on the Plugins Directory both from the website and from within your blog’s admin (Plugins → Add New).
I'm not even sure 2 horribles is enough to describe just how bad the old Wordpress search was in the plugin directory. Even if you knew the exact name or the plugin author's exact name, 9 times out of 10 you still would have to go through 3+ pages to find a relevant result (if you even got any relevant results). This weakness basically killed the usefulness of being able to install plugins from the admin area, since you couldn't ever find a plugin you needed. It was seriously just the worst search I had ever seen. From what I've seen so far of the new search, it looks like Sphinx actually returns relevant results. Even that is a major improvement from the old crappy search engine.
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