Opensolr Changelog — Recent Updates & Improvements

Search Apr 22, 2026

Improved Locale facet — flags and readable names throughout the search UI. The Locale sidebar facet now shows flag emojis and language names instead of raw locale codes: hr_hr becomes 🇭🇷 Croatian, sr_sr becomes 🇷🇸 Serbian, and so on. The top-right All Locales selector panel also displays the correct country flag beside each language group. Active locale filters — whether applied from the sidebar facet or the top-right panel — appear as removable pills labelled with flag and name. Languages without a canonical country flag (e.g. Latin, constructed codes) show a 🌐 globe icon. Applied across the Opensolr search page, Drupal module, and WordPress plugin.

Improved Search page pagination layout cleaned up — pagination is now rendered inside the results column instead of drifting to the left under the facet sidebar, and the redundant top pagination block (which appeared next to the "Did you mean" spellcheck line) has been removed. Pagination now lives only at the bottom of the results, aligned with the rest of the content.

Improved Improved hybrid search relevance — in vector hybrid mode, lexical field weight boosts are now automatically zeroed out so that semantic similarity drives the relevance ranking. Previously, even small lexical boosts could inflate scores well above the 0-1 vector range, pushing semantically relevant results down. Field weights still apply when search falls back to pure lexical mode.

Improved Search results count now appears directly below the search bar for immediate feedback. Response time displayed in seconds (e.g. 0.09 s) instead of milliseconds. Price and date facet sliders stay visible even when filters narrow results to a single item.

Improved Price filter topbar slider tooltips now show thousands separators (e.g. 15,638.00 instead of 15638.00). Consistent number formatting across all slider controls, tooltips, and input fields.
Improved Active filter pills now show numbers with thousands separators (e.g. "Price from: 9,507.99" instead of "9507.99"). Applies to both the facet sidebar pills and the topbar price filter pills.
Improved Facet slider inputs now display numbers with thousands separators (e.g. 15,637.00 instead of 15637.00) for better readability. Float fields (_f) show 2 decimals, integer fields show none. Min values are floored and max values are ceiled so the range always covers all results.

Improved Search header now stays fixed at the top while scrolling through results, keeping the search box and controls always within reach.
Improved Search transitions now show a loading overlay with animated dots, so you know the search is working — especially helpful on slower connections or large indexes.

Improved Price badges now display currency symbols (€, $, £, ¥, etc.) instead of raw currency codes in search results. Prices also display correctly for all indexes regardless of schema configuration.
Improved Improved vector search accuracy — the embedding model now uses instruction-tuned prefixes that optimize query vectors for retrieval. Expect 5–15% better recall on natural language queries and stronger cross-language matching (e.g. searching in Romanian and finding English results).

Improved Search clear button (✕) is now larger and more tappable on mobile — the button is bigger, has a generous tap target with padding, and shows a visual press animation on touch. Easier to clear a query on any device.
Improved Fresh mode is now a date window filter — Search Tuning now lets you set a Freshness Window of 2 to 365 days. When "Fresh" mode is selected, only content published within that window is returned — no more recent-but-irrelevant results pushing down the most relevant ones. The old boost-factor approach that could surface off-topic content is replaced by a clean date range filter.

Improved Search relevancy defaults updated to Flexible minimum match — queries now return more results by default, especially for longer natural-language searches. Short queries (1-2 words) still require all terms to match, while longer queries allow partial matches for better recall. Per-index Search Tuning overrides are unaffected.

Improved The Pin, Exclude, and Exclude All buttons on the search elevation toolbar are now high-contrast and color-coded — orange for Pin, red for Exclude — so they stand out clearly as interactive controls.
Improved Elevation actions are now mutually exclusive per document — clicking Pin on an excluded result automatically removes the exclude first, and vice versa. No more stale conflicting rules.
Improved Query Analytics & Tools — the former Query Statistics page has been completely redesigned into a clean tabbed application. Overview, Queries, and Elevation Rules each live in their own tab with lazy AJAX loading. Elevation rules now show full document details (title, description, URL) instead of raw Solr IDs, with accordion-style collapsible query groups and a regex search to instantly find any elevated document across all rules.

Improved Vector search verified and battle-tested — hybrid search (vector + keyword) has been tested across live indexes with real-world queries. Semantic understanding works out of the box: try searching for "how do I download my invoices and upgrade my account?" on opensolr.com and see how it finds the right pages even when no document contains those exact words.
Improved Search result snippets are now shorter and more meaningful. Instead of dumping huge walls of text, the highlighter picks the most relevant sentence around your search terms — cleaner, easier to scan, and actually useful.

Improved AI-powered search summaries are now more accurate and context-aware
Improved Hybrid search (keyword + semantic) now produces more balanced, relevant results