Check out customizing the WP template search.php… you could detect the custom post type query and build your query inside the search.php template as needed. IF query = custom post type THEN Customize query using WP_query ElSE Show Standard search results END IF Hope that helps.
You are missing the closing ?> php tag before the <article> tag.
If your topics are categories, you can use the Search by Category plugin.
From codex – you should be able to use taxonomy-service-category.php template to display service-category posts.
Whats the loop look like on your search.php page? That’s the search results template, and that’s where the different output – either the_excerpt or the_content – is determined. See Template Tags/the_content « WordPress Codex and Template Tags/the excerpt « WordPress Codex.
Try selecting “always” for fuzzy matches in the preferences. In the default setting, if search finds only 1 result, fuzzy matching won’t get activated.
Sounds like something Relevanssi could handle. With Relevanssi, you’d have the checkboxes to choose the categories. Then, you’d write a function to hook on ‘relevanssi_modify_wp_query’ filter, where you’d read the checkboxes and convert them to a comma-separated list of category ID’s. That you would store in $wp_query->query_vars[‘cats’] and hey presto, Relevanssi gives you relevant results … Read more
You can always noindex those pages from your robots.txt file. User-agent: * Disallow: /all-bots/noindex-this-page.html
You can start with the Search Everything plugin and go from there. It won’t exclude all post title and content, but it will enable searching in tags. Perhaps you can see how they accomplish it and modify from there. I imagine it will entail some direct SQL manipulation via the query filters posts_where, posts_join, posts_request, … Read more
I think that your main problem is that you are trying to display the results with searchform.php. That is basically just the form for the search, which you don’t need since you have your own form in the sidebar (if I understand you correctly). The results of a WP search are displayed with “search.php“