Opensolr Changelog — Recent Updates & Improvements

Search Apr 22, 2026

Fix Fixed a JavaScript SecurityError thrown when the Opensolr search page is embedded inside a cross-origin iframe. Browsers block showPicker() calls from cross-origin frames; the call is now wrapped in a try/catch so the browser restriction is silently handled instead of surfacing as an uncaught exception that could disrupt other search functionality on the host page.
Improved Search queries that contain a AND prefix (uppercase AND with spaces on both sides) now automatically strip everything before and including it, searching only the part that follows. For example, Crna Gora AND montenegrin constitution runs as montenegrin constitution. Useful for sites that prepend locale or scope context to a query as a workaround for index-level language filtering.
Fix Fixed four search parameter bugs across all platforms. (1) Wildcard searches (*:*) no longer send any highlighting parameters to Solr — highlighting on a catch-all query is meaningless and wastes server cycles. (2) The Solr highlight query (hl.q) was incorrectly set to *:* instead of the real search terms, so highlighted snippets never matched actual keywords. (3) A hardcoded stats=true / stats.field=price_f block was attached to every query even for non-commerce indexes. (4) currency_s was hardcoded into the facet field list regardless of whether the index has that field. All four are fixed in Opensolr, the Drupal module, and the WordPress plugin.
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.
New New Lexical Only search mode in Search Tuning → Search Mode. Explicit opt-out from vector — no embedding API call is made, search runs straight through the lexical edismax path. Useful for deterministic BM25 ranking, avoiding embedding API latency, or users on plans without vector who want explicit control instead of the implicit server-side fallback. When selected, the Minimum Relevance Score slider auto-zeros itself (that threshold is calibrated for the combined hybrid score; a positive value would filter out every result in pure lexical mode) and a yellow note explains the coupling.

Search Apr 21, 2026

Fix Fixed custom Minimum Match values not saving. Values containing the less-than character (e.g. 2<95% 5<90% 8<80%) were silently truncated to just the first number because the global XSS filter stripped the < before the value reached the save handler. The tuning form now reads the raw request body for this field — custom mm presets save and apply correctly.
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.
New New Search Operators help button next to the Search bar. Opens a panel explaining "phrase match", +required, and -excluded operators with examples and a note on why they matter in hybrid search. Users can now refine queries like +laptop "13 inch" -refurbished and cut through semantic noise instantly.
New New Minimum Relevance Score slider in Search Tuning. Drops hits whose combined lexical + vector score falls below the threshold, cleaning noise out of facet counts and result totals. Essential for hybrid search on catalog-style content — without it, numFound balloons to the entire filter set and facet counts pick up docs the user would never consider relevant. Slider moves in 0.1 increments, default 0.3, 0 disables.

Search Apr 10, 2026

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.

Search Apr 9, 2026

Fix Fixed Query Elevation controls not appearing on the hosted search page. Token-based authentication now accounts for CAPTCHA verification time, and elevation settings take effect immediately after toggling (previously required up to 10 minutes due to caching).
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.

Search Apr 4, 2026

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.

Search Apr 3, 2026

Fix Fixed search result highlighting — switched to a more reliable highlighter that correctly highlights keywords in short fields like titles. Also added text_t (structured text) to highlighted fields for richer snippets.
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.
New Facet filter sidebar — filter search results by category, price, date, and any structured field. Supports list facets, numeric sliders, and date range pickers. "Show more" dialog with letter index for browsing large facet lists. Active filters shown as removable pills. Configure facets from the admin panel under Search Facet Filters.

Search Mar 31, 2026

Fix Fixed search queries containing apostrophes (e.g. "don't", "it's", "O'Brien") — the search box was showing the Solr-escaped version of the query instead of the original text. Now displays the clean, unescaped query back to the user.

Search Mar 28, 2026

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).

Search Mar 23, 2026

New Hybrid Search Live Demo page — try vector + keyword search, facets, autocomplete, AI Hints, and all search features on a real index without signing up.

Search Mar 18, 2026

Fix Fixed autocomplete highlight incorrectly highlighting short stopwords (e.g. "e", "a", "i") inside suggestions. Highlight now only applies to query terms that are 3 characters or longer.
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.

Search Mar 17, 2026

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.
Fix Fixed "Did you mean?" spellcheck suggestions — previously only corrected a single word in the query (e.g. "downloda invoicesr" → "download"). Now corrects all misspelled words and shows the full corrected query (e.g. "download invoices"). Works across all Search pages including hybrid vector search.

Search Mar 8, 2026

New Search Tuning — six per-index relevancy controls in Index Settings. Adjust field weights, freshness boost, minimum match mode, semantic vs keyword balance, result quality threshold, and results per page. Each index is tuned independently. Changes save automatically and take effect on the next search — no reindexing, no restart.

Search Mar 7, 2026

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.
Fix Fixed a critical bug where pinning multiple documents to the same query only applied the last one. Solr was receiving the document IDs in the wrong format — now all pinned results correctly appear at the top in the order you set them.
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.
New Global elevation rules — the new "Pin All" and "Exclude All" buttons let you pin or exclude a result across every search query, not just the one you are looking at. A globally pinned page always appears at the top; a globally excluded page never shows up in results, regardless of what the user searches for.
New Query Elevation is here — pin or exclude specific search results directly from the Search UI. Enable it in your index settings, then use the elevation toolbar on any search result to pin it to the top or hide it entirely. Pin and exclude work per-query (only for a specific search term) or globally (for all searches). Pinned results can be reordered by drag-and-drop. Useful for promoting important pages, burying outdated content, or curating results for key queries.

Search Mar 4, 2026

Fix Search results no longer show Jan 01 1970 as the date when a document has no real creation date. The date badge is now hidden entirely when no valid date is available.
Fix Fixed title and description highlighting on complex search queries. When a query contained boolean operators like AND or OR, only the full-text body was being highlighted — titles and short descriptions were left plain. Highlighting now works consistently across all result fields, regardless of how complex your query is.

Search Mar 1, 2026

Fix Fixed search results showing blank descriptions on some indexes. When the Solr highlighter could not find matching terms in the description field, results appeared with no text at all — even though the document had a perfectly good description. The fallback logic now correctly shows the original description when no highlighted snippet is available.
New Freshness and sentiment sorting in the Web Crawler Search UI. Set fresh=yes to sort by newest first, or fresh=no for pure relevance ranking. For indexes with sentiment analysis, use fresh=positive or fresh=negative to surface results by sentiment. Freshness boost is enabled by default on most indexes and automatically disabled on static collections.
New Language and source filters in the Web Crawler Search UI. Filter results by detected language using the lang parameter or the Languages dropdown — populated automatically from your indexed content. Filter by source domain with the source parameter or the Sources dropdown. Both filters update dynamically based on what your index actually contains.
New Price filtering and sorting for e-commerce indexes. Set price_min and price_max in your URL to filter products by price range, and price_sort=asc or price_sort=desc to sort by price. The Advanced Filters panel shows a slider UI when price data is available. Works on any index with price_f and currency_s fields.
New AI Hints — click the AI Hints button on any search and get a streaming AI-generated summary that synthesizes the top results into a concise answer. Works in both full and embedded modes. Uses your actual indexed content as context, so the answers are grounded in your data, not generic. Set ai=yes in your URL to auto-trigger it on page load.
New OG image thumbnails in search results. When og=yes (the default), results display thumbnail previews pulled from each page Open Graph meta tags. Set og=no to hide thumbnails for a text-only, faster-loading results view. Image search mode (in=images) always shows thumbnails regardless of the og setting.
New Embeddable mode for the Web Crawler Search UI. Set topbar=off to hide the search header and filters, leaving just clean results with a minimal status bar showing result count and timing. Perfect for embedding search results inside your own website via an iframe. AI Hints button stays accessible in the compact bar.
New Full-width layout option for the Web Crawler Search UI. Add layout=fullwidth to your search URL and results stretch edge-to-edge across the entire viewport — great for wide monitors or embedding in full-width pages. Toggle it on the fly with the layout button in the toolbar. Default mode keeps the familiar contained width.
New Infinite scroll is now the default pagination in the Web Crawler Search UI. Results load automatically as you scroll down — no clicking through pages. Prefer traditional page numbers? Switch anytime with the pagination toggle in the toolbar, or set pagination_style=pages in your URL. Your choice is remembered across searches.
New Dark mode for the Web Crawler Search UI. Add ui_theme=dark to your search URL and the entire interface switches to a dark navy palette — results, filters, buttons, pagination, even AI Hints and code blocks all adapt automatically. Easy on the eyes for late-night browsing or dark-themed websites. Toggle it live with the theme button in the toolbar.

Search Feb 25, 2026

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.

Search Feb 21, 2026

New Dense vector indexes are now automatically recognized for semantic search
Fix Language/locale filter in search now correctly filters results
Improved AI-powered search summaries are now more accurate and context-aware
New Search relevance scores are now visible on all result pages
Improved Hybrid search (keyword + semantic) now produces more balanced, relevant results