stale results

I was able to solve this by changing the source of the search query – I was using custom attributes – possibly my custom attributes were broken in some way.

I implemented some results caching in ajax_search.php, it seems to work – here it is:

//Disable caching
//header('Cache-Control: no-cache');
//header('Pragma: no-cache');

$action = esc_attr(trim($_POST['action']));

//A bit of security
$allowed_actions = WD_ASL_Ajax::getAll();
WD_ASL_Ajax::registerAll(true);

if (isset($_POST['aslp']) && isset($_POST['asid']) && !isset($_POST['shift8-ajax'])) {
    $vc_id = $_POST['aslp'] . $_POST['asid']. $_POST['options'];
    $post_vars = $_POST;
    $cache_file = plugin_dir_path(__FILE__)."cache/".hash('md5', $vc_id).".html";
	
	// If the file exists and was cached in the last 5 days...
	if (file_exists($cache_file) && (filemtime($cache_file) > (time() - (86400*5) ))) {
		$file = file_get_contents($cache_file); // Get the file from the cache.
		die($file); // echo the file out to the browser.
	} else {
		$post_vars['shift8-ajax'] = true;
		$result = wp_remote_post( 'https://<YOURSITE>.com/wp-content/plugins/ajax-search-lite/ajax_search.php',
								 array(
									 'method' => 'POST',
									 'timeout' => 45,
									 'redirection' => 5,
									 'httpversion' => '1.0',
									 'blocking' => true,
									 'headers' => array(),
									 'body' => $post_vars,
									 'cookies' => array()
								 )
								);
		if ( is_wp_error( $result ) ) {
			$error_message = $response->get_error_message();
			echo "Something went wrong: $error_message";
		} else {
			$result_body = wp_remote_retrieve_body($result);
			file_put_contents($cache_file, $result_body, LOCK_EX);
			die($result_body);
		}
	}
}