Almost every custom WordPress site I work on has different requirements. Some are company profiles, directories, or knowledge bases. Others are internal company sites with thousands of records. But no matter the project type, I kept noticing the same pattern. Sooner or later, a client would ask, “Can we make the search a bit smarter?” What’s interesting is that they never asked how I would build it. They didn’t care whether I used WP_Query, the WordPress REST API, or something else entirely. All they cared about was one thing. If they couldn’t find what they were looking for, the search…