It's important to note whether you are searching from the field on the store's Home tab or on the store's Products tab . Results are different depending on which one you use. For instance -
Using your Pacifier City Cards store as an example
If I use the search field on the store's Home to search for [basketball] I get this:
It doesn't show me any search results, there's nothing noticeably different here from the Home page except if you notice the "fine print" that says "View All Results for 'basketball' in Collections". If I click that hot link I get this:
It's clearly searching not product tags & titles here, but only Collection tags/title.
On the other hand, if I use the search field from the Products tabs, it searches product type category, not tags/titles of all products
I haven't figured out how to test this theory in any meaningful way, but it seems that if you have chosen to show Collections on your store home, then the store Home search field searches only Collection tags/titles. But trying to get around that by using the search field on the Products tab instead, it treats it as though you are searching for that product type rather than that keyword.
For my store, I don't have Collections showing on my store Home. But I do have one published lamp (product type) and I also have one unrelated design i named "lava lamp" and thus "lamp" is in the tags/title for numerous products, plus "lava lamp" is the actual name of a Collection. But that design/Collection name is not associated with any actual lamps. Searching for [lamp] from my store's Home or Product tab gives one result - the one actual lamp I have published. So I think that since I do not have Collections showing on my Home page, if searching from the Home page it's skipping searching for Collections with [lamp] as a keyword and going right to looking for product type = lamp, just as it does when searching from the Products tab instead.
Interestingly, if I search either the Home or Products tab for ["lava lamp"] (with quotes), 'lamp' is no longer singled out as a product type and instead I get all the products I have used "lava lamp" as a exact phrase keyword for - so no actual lamps. But If I search either tab for [lava lamp] (no quotes) I get no results. Which doesn't jibe with the next example (*); it should be honing in on 'lamp' as a product type and therefore showing me my one actual lamp.
So going back to your basketball example at Pacifier City Cards:
If I search from your store's Home for [boys basketball], with or without quotes around it, I get zero results because it is searching Collections that include both those keywords.
If I search for ["boys basketball"] (with the quotes) from your Products tab, I get three results where "boys basketball" occurs as an exact phrase in the title. If I search for just ["basketball"] (with the quotes) I get six results where "basketball" occurs as a keyword in the title.
(*); If I don't surround either with quotes, I get no results because once again, it's honing in on 'basketball' as a product type and thus no matches.
To summarize my rudimentary testing:
- if you have Collections showing on your Home page, a search from the Home page field searches keywords used for Collections, not products. To search individual products instead, you need to use the Products tab field.
- if you search from the Products tab field (or the Home page field if you have no Collections showing) and one of the keywords entered happens to also be a product type, it defaults to looking for that product type instead of that keyword unless you surround the keyword(s) with quotes - then it treats it/them as keywords and not a product type.
I don't know. Tags/keywords that also happen to be a designated product type pose a problem. One customer could be searching for "basketball" because they want a bunch of actual basketballs which they could then browse for whatever design appeals to them, while another customer might be looking for basketball themed designs and not an actual basketball. I don't know how any search algorithm could deal with this, other then yield ALL results where 'basketball' (or whatever) is either a product type or keyword, and then offer a quick & obvious way to narrow it down to specifically that product type, for the customers who want an actual basketball and not just a basketball theme. But I do know that using quotes to make it search as keyword(s) rather than specific product type is not something most people are going to know or guess.
Also, for the Collections situation - the search field on the Home page should say "search Collections" instead of "search this store" because it's not actually searching the store for matching products, it's just searching for matching Collections.
Yep. It brings up the Art & Wall Decor category. But if you put it in quotes ["art deco"] it's just treated as normal keyword search and bring up products with that phrase in them.
I didn't know it until the other night when poking around in response to Pacifier City's post. And it doesn't even have to be a phrase. You can put just the single word in quotes to keep it from defaulting to product type search. So [lamp] returns only the one actual lamp I have whereas ["lamp"] brings up that one actual lamp plus the 16 other unrelated-to-lamps products where lamp occurs in the tags or title (as part of 'lava lamp'). I doubt this is something that would occur to a customer to do, but for designers searching their own store, it's helpful.
Wow, that's a tough one.
I have 9 Custom-Cut Vinyl Stickers in my store. I tried (repeatedly) every term/phrase I could think of from the Products tab search and nothing would return all nine of that product type and nothing else. Sometimes other types of stickers would be included, sometimes only seven or eight of the nine would come up, always the same one or two missing.
Searching from my Home tab instead (where I do not have Collections showing), just the one word 'contour' (with or without quotes) returns all nine and nothing else. Great! Except when I click the "View All Results for 'contour' in Products" and it switches to the Products tab with the back-end view, it only shows me eight. It's the same one sticker always missing and I don't think it's an indexing thing since it's one that has sold before. And the really weird thing is, if I switch to public view, it shows me all nine, switch back to store management view (without redoing the search or reloading the page or anything) and it's back to the one sticker missing. Switch back to public view, all nine are there again. So weird. I am glad I rarely search my own store for anything.
