The Term Archive Priority Extension will force term archive pages to bubble to the top of search results when a match is found. This Extension only applies to supplemental search engines. Out of the box, all supplemental search engines will apply this change when the plugin is active, but you can filter that down to specific supplemental search engines by doing something like the following:
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NOTE: by default, Term Archive Priority supports exact taxonomy term matches. If you would like to enable matching of any word within a taxonomy term, use the following filter:
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Once activated, you will need to customize your search results loop so as to account for term archive pages in the results. This is a full theme template example outlining how to properly implement the Term Archive Priority Extension:
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