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