Searching through entire site at once?

[ryelle]

There are multiple different searches on developer.wordpress.org, depending on where you start searching from.

If you start from the code reference, it only searches the code reference, and you can also filter down by function, hooks, etc.

If you start from a handbook & use the sidebar search, it only searches that section

[

](https://developer.wordpress.org/apis/?s=email)

Above only shows results in the "Common APIs" section, while if you search in the "Block Editor" section, it only shows those results.

All of these can be useful if you already know what you're looking for, but if you're not sure, there's no (obvious?) way to search the whole site.

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This also came up as part of the Developer Blog project, where they want a search that can search all the content on developer.wordpress.org and developer.wordpress.org/blog.

[iandunn]

I like being able to search a specific handbook, but I can also see the value in a broader search. What if we let folks choose?

That could even be checkboxes and a list of all the handbooks, so you can search multiple places without being overwhelmed by too many results.

[iandunn]

If we do this, we might also want to look into using ElasticSearch, since I'm guessing the "all sites" results won't be great using WP's default engine.

That could be a "wait and see" thing, though.

[StevenDufresne]

I've also seen the algolia (search aggregator) style result set becoming more common where the results are presented in a sectioned menu.