Advanced Search Included with every site
Better search for your Ghost® site
Ghost’s built-in search only looks at titles, excerpts, tags and author names. Advanced Search reads every word of your public posts, finds posts even when the search is misspelled and shows you what readers looked for.
No credit card required
Is your archive outgrowing Ghost’s search?
Most sites are fine with the built-in search for years. But it stops being enough once you or your readers can’t find a post by guessing its title.
Time to switch if…
- Your archive has grown past the point where readers can guess a post’s title.
- Readers ask “didn’t you write about…?” and you dig for the link yourself.
- You can’t always remember which of your own posts mentioned something.
- You publish members-only posts and want free readers to find them by title.
- You want to know what your audience is looking for, in their own words.
Stay with the default if…
- Each post covers one thing, and its title says what.
- Readers find things through your homepage, tags or newsletter.
- Nobody has asked you where an old post went.
Ghost’s built-in search is on every Magic Pages site from day one, so there’s nothing to change.
Search that reads the whole post
Advanced Search is full-text search for Ghost, built on the open-source Typesense engine and included in the Magic Pages plan. Your theme’s search button stays where it is. Readers click it like before and get better results.
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Finds words inside your posts and pages
Advanced Search reads every word of your public posts, not only the title and excerpt. Turn on the Pages switch and your About or Contact page comes up too.
So a reader who remembers one line from a post you wrote years ago can type it and land on that post, with the passage that matched highlighted in the result.
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Forgives typos
Someone typing “newsleter” still lands on your newsletter posts. A missing letter, an extra one or a slip of the thumb on a phone keyboard doesn’t end the search.
Results also show up while readers are still typing the last word. If your site needs exact spelling, for product codes say, you can switch typo matching off.
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Matches meaning
With semantic search switched on, “growing tomatoes” can find a post called “Vegetable garden tips”, even though the two share no words.
You decide how far it reaches: keyword matches first, meaning first or an even mix, and how close a match has to be before it shows up at all.
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Shows members-only posts without giving them away
Switch on members-only content and those posts become findable by title and excerpt, marked Members or Paid members, so a free subscriber can tell before they click.
The post itself never goes into the search index, so nothing from behind your paywall can turn up in a result. Readers still need the right membership to open it.
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Tells you what readers look for
You see how often readers search, how many of those searches ended in a click and which ones found nothing. It counts search terms, never people, and you can switch it off.
The searches that found nothing are a list of posts your readers want and you haven’t written yet. The most common ones can go straight into the suggestions readers see before they type. How search insights work
Your options for search on Ghost
There’s more than one good answer. Here’s what each one costs you in money and time.
Swipe the table sideways to compare all four.
| Ghost’s built-in | Our code, self-hosted | Algolia | Magic Pages | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it searches | Titles, excerpts, tags, authors | Full text | Full text | Full text of public posts and pages |
| Forgives typos | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| See what readers search for | No | Once you set it up | In Algolia’s dashboard | In your customer portal |
| Set-up | Nothing to do | A server, a sync job and theme changes | An account, a sync job and theme changes | Two clicks |
| Extra bill | None | Your server costs | Free tier, then usage-based | None, it’s included |
| Who keeps it running | Ghost | You | You and Algolia | Our team |
“Ghost’s built-in” is the search every Ghost site has, including Ghost(Pro). “Our code, self-hosted” is the open-source version of Advanced Search, run on a Typesense server of your own. We checked each product’s own documentation in November 2026 (Ghost, Typesense, our code on GitHub, Algolia). Algolia is a mature hosted service with more tuning options than we offer, and Ghost’s built-in search is a good default for smaller sites.
Built in the open, running right here
Try it on this site
The search in our menu runs on Advanced Search. Type something, and misspell it if you like.
Open source, the same code we run
Typesense is the open-source search engine underneath. The search window we built on top of it is open source too, and it’s the one your readers see on Magic Pages. Run it on your own server, or let us run it for you.
1,600+ publishers host with us
Writers, newsletters and small businesses run their Ghost sites on Magic Pages. Every one of them can switch Advanced Search on.
Switching it on takes two clicks
No scripts to paste into your theme and no API keys to copy between dashboards.
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Open the Search tab
It’s in your Magic Pages customer portal, next to your site’s other settings.
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Pick Advanced Search
Click Change on the integration row, choose Advanced Search and save.
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Give it a few minutes
A small site is searchable in a few minutes, a big archive takes longer. Your theme stays as it is.
Tune it to your site
Ranking controls, suggested searches and styling are all in the set-up guide.
Already running Ghost somewhere else?
We move your posts, members and paid subscriptions for you. Most moves are free on any plan, and big ones are free with a yearly plan.
Questions you might have
Something else on your mind? Email us. A real person reads every message, usually the same day.
Last updated
Ghost’s built-in search looks at titles, excerpts, tags and authors, and only finds exact matches. Advanced Search reads the full text of your public posts and pages, forgives typos, can match meaning and shows you what readers search for.
No. The search box your readers already use is the one that gets upgraded, so your theme doesn’t need touching.
Yes, if you switch it on. Members-only posts show up by title and excerpt, marked Members or Paid members, so a free subscriber can tell before they click. What’s behind the paywall stays behind it.
Only as counts of search terms, with nothing that identifies anyone. If you’d rather not collect even that, switch search analytics off and search keeps working.
No. Magic Pages has one plan, from $14.50 a month, and Advanced Search is part of it. There’s no separate account to manage and no usage limit to watch.
We move your site for you: posts, pages, members and paid subscriptions, which keep billing through your own Stripe account. Most moves are free on any plan, and big ones are free with a yearly plan. Start the trial, then tell us where your site lives. How migration works
Yes. The search window your readers see on Magic Pages is open source on GitHub, along with the tools that keep a Typesense index in sync with Ghost. You’d run your own Typesense server, keep the index in sync and add the search to your theme yourself. That’s the work we do for you here.
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