Advanced Site Search features numerous features and improvements over the basic Joomla search engine including multi-site searching, relevant search sorting and backend searching. Specifically:

For end users

1. Search results displayed in order of relevance (similar to search engine results sorting)
2. Enhanced filtering tools including content categories and date/date ranges
3. Specify a default search term when creating a menu item
4. Typorgaphical error suggestions to help detect typos
5. Ability to save searches and recieve email or RSS notifications when new content matching the saved search is published
6. Sticky search term entry and results filtering

For site administrators and implementors

1. Multi-site search capability with site-2-site authentication to allow searching across a set of Joomla sites
2. Customizeable search areas
3. Customizeable ignore lists
4. Customizeable parameters for the relevance engine (allows custom weighting of relevance parameters)
5. Visual reporting of main search terms
6. Backend, full database searching for quickly finding and editing content
7. Custom control of minimum characters for search term

For developers

1. Flexible API for search plugins, allowing extension developers to take advantage of date- and category-based filtering of seach results
2. Graceful degradation of API so all existing Joomla search plugins remain compatible