There seems to be a bug in Shopify’s Search and Discovery app
Started 1-2 weeks ago
Searches with a small number of matches often now surface unrelated / random products (1 or 2)
Causing a lot of confusion with search by SKU where merchants put SKU in description (since the app annoyingly doesn’t support this)
Searching by SKU (highly unique string in description) now frequently surfaces random new products
Hoping someone at shopify picks this one up - negative reviews are stacking up on the app and connected to a recent update.
Hey @Joe_Dempsey, thanks for the detailed writeup here. Can you share a few more details to help us narrow this down:
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When you search a SKU that’s stored in the product description, is the expected product still showing up in the results alongside the unrelated ones, or is it missing entirely?
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If you run the same search a few times in a row, do the results stay consistent or do they change between refreshes?
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It’s also worth checking whether the SKU string appears anywhere in the unexpected products that are surfacing. The Search and Discovery app matches across product titles, descriptions, tags, and variant fields by default, so if that string is present in any of those fields on the random products, that would explain why they’re appearing.
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Does the predictive search dropdown behave differently than the full search results page for the same query?
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Can you pin down a more specific date for when this started? A tighter timeframe would help.
hey @KyleG-Shopify
appreciate the reply
it was first reported last week on a plus store
that was actually searching by title thinking of it
today I’m observing it searching by SKU in another plus store
behaviour is both same in predictive search and search
predictive shows “no results” but on enter it does show the product almost always first
yesterday it was 2 random new products
earlier it was 2 other products
right now it’s multiple
it’s frequently the same products showing regardless of search
no pattern of connection I can see in strings etc - partial matches
I tried earlier testing on a vanilla shopify theme with nothing modified & same
SKU: D733688
URL:
vanilla theme preview (horizon)
it seems like the bug is that there’s something cached on no results
the random products show when you search for any random strings
e.g
1234565liugo8yg8uyvi8fvougo8yuyvo768fo76f7ofi6
gives same results after searching for sku: D733688
it’s something to do with 0 result or 0 perceived result matches or small single results
it’s impacting very narrow searches
Hey @Joe_Dempsey, thanks for those replication steps. The fact that it reproduces on an unmodified Horizon theme and across multiple Plus stores rules out a lot of the usual variables.
The best next step would be to reach out to our support team in the help center so we can look in to those specific stores in a secure way and dig in further. Being able to see the impact on live plus stores will help our dev teams triage this appropriately. Feel free to link to this thread when you reach out so the team has the full context.
I’ve given up on support tbh @KyleG-Shopify - complete waste of my time. (Just get stuck in a doom loop of stupid AI answers even when you invest the effort/established partner)
One of the impacted clients has done so via Plus support. I’ll update here if there’s anything since it’s a clear bug and can see others impacted.
@KyleG-Shopify
I haven’t got ticket but the last part of message they added for me was
I’ve heard back from our Search team with an update on what’s happening. As they explained, this is currently a known limitation with how Shopify’s semantic search works. When you search by SKU, semantic search broadens the results beyond exact matches, which is why unrelated products are appearing below the correct one. Our team has already shipped a fix that pushes exact SKU matches to the top of results, which is why the correct product is appearing first, but additional unrelated products can still appear below it. This is something the team continues to track and work on.
it’s clearly a new bug - app getting trashed on reviews which is a shame because this app solves a lot of other pain points. I’ll put in some kind of js patch to hide the junk but search by SKU is leaned on a lot esp with b2b/plus sites we work with.