Troubleshoot Search Results

When configuring search and navigation for your storefront, will often need to troubleshoot your search results. Consider things like queries, indexes, stemming, performance, availability ranking, and how your products are configured.

Use the following tips to troubleshoot search results:

Queries and search results: you can see how a query is constructed using the storefront toolkit Search Information tool.
Indexes: if a particular feature of indexes doesn't appear to work, check to make sure that the feature is enabled on the Search > Search Preferences page.
Stemming: if stemming doesn't work in a non-English locale, change the stemmer language setting for the index on the Search Indexes > Language Options page.
Performance: you can view the index summary for any index on the Search Indexes > Index > General tab. This tells you the number of elements indexed. A large number of elements indexed can indicate a fix for a performance problem. If no elements are indexed, return to the Search Indexes page and rebuild the index. If an excessively large number of items are indexed, you might want to consider adding stop words.
Availability ranking: if the availability index doesn't seem to recognize a change in the availability threshold, make sure that you made the change on the production system. Because the availability index isn't stageable, changing the availability threshold in the staging search configuration does not replicate to the production system.

Searching for Standard Products

A standard product is found by keyword search if the product is online, searchable, and assigned to the storefront catalog. If a product is assigned to both online and offline categories, it's still indexed. Only product attributes that are configured as searchable attributes are indexed.

Searching for Bundled Products

Bundled products are treated identically to standard products. The product bundle must be online, searchable, and assigned to the storefront catalog.

Searching for Variation Products

A variation product is found by keyword search if the variation is online and the base product is online, searchable, and assigned to the storefront catalog.

Searching for Product Sets

For a product set to be found based on a product in the set, the product in the set must be online and the product set must be online, searchable, and assigned to the storefront catalog.

Searching for variation products as part of product Sets

A product set is found by keyword search if the search text is contained in the product set or any product in the set. If the product is a variation product, it's found in the base product or any of the variation products.

A product set is contained in a refined search result if the refinement attribute is defined for any products in the set. If the product is a variation product, any of the variation products that match the refinement are included in the refined search result.

If a product set contains variation products, it's sorted based on the attributes defined in the variation products, unless the product set or the base product defines its own values for these attributes, such as for aggregated active data metrics.

Availability doesn't affect the search results, even if the variation product searched for, such as "size 28 bootcut jeans" isn't available, the product set that contains it appears in the search result.

Searching by Product ID

Product IDs are split for search purposes, and a search containing any part of the split ID will return the product.. There are three criteria for when product IDs are split:

On punctuation characters '-', '/' and '|'. For example, "PS-40/a" becomes "PS" "40" "a".
On character-number transitions. For example, "PS40a" becomes "PS" "40" "a".
On leading zeros. For example, "00001234" becomes "0000" "1234" (if configured to ignore leading zeros).