Troubleshoot Unexpected Search Results

Your search results depend on your item catalog, item record data, search settings, and the search query. Because of these, you might see any of the following:

Relevant items are returned at the top
Irrelevant items are returned before relevant items
Irrelevant items are returned intermittently
Relevant items are not returned
No items are returned

Relevant items at the top implies you’ve set up the right fields in your search settings for your published items. You don’t need to do anything else right now.

But if you have Google Analytics enabled, you can check the search terms your shoppers use to help fine-tune your Search Settings as described in Improve Relevance of your Search Results.

Irrelevant items might be returned before relevant items because of your Search Settings. Try tweaking your Search Settings to see if you get better results.

Sometimes, a search term might be used over and over in the description of an unrelated product, making that item show up in the results. Try rewording those descriptions to fix this.

Irrelevant items might be returned intermittently because of stemming, which can be sub-optimal in some situations. Stemming reduces words to their root form at both index and query time, so if two or more words share the same stem and the match type is set to Keyword, you might see some irrelevant items mixed in with the relevant ones.

For example, generator, generic, and general all get stemmed to gener in the Search Index, so searching for generator brings up all of them.

If relevant items are not returned even though they’re published, you might have picked the wrong field under Search Fields or set the wrong match type.

For items to be searchable:

The field on the item record and the one in your search fields sublist should match. For example, the Web Store Display Name field is called Online Name in the Search Fields dropdown. To make sure you’ve picked the right one, always check the Field ID of a field using the FieldSetsList.xls spreadsheet.
Any item fields you add under Search Fields should have values filled in on the item record.
The match type you pick for a Search Field should fit the data in your item record and the search query.

If no items are returned in the search results even though your settings are right and the item is published, the Item Search API might not be returning items. Try rebuilding the search index manually as described in Rebuild the Search Index Manually.

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