Search Not Displaying Products Where Numbers Are Inserted

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A store owner encountered an issue where products with dates in their names (e.g., “Pontiac Firebird 1980-81”) weren’t appearing in search results when customers entered shortened year formats like “80” instead of “1980”.

Attempted Solutions:

  • Initially tried creating a synonym in the Search & Discovery app to map “80” to “1980” — this didn’t work
  • Added “80” as a product tag, but searches still returned no results

Resolution:
The problem was resolved by enabling the “search by tag” option in the theme settings. Once activated, the tag-based approach worked successfully, allowing products to appear when customers search using shortened year formats.

Status: Issue resolved. The discussion concluded with the solution being marked as accepted for future reference by others facing similar problems.

Summarized with AI on November 17. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi all,

My store has product names that include dates. For example, in the following format:

Example Name: Pontiac Firebird 1980-81

The problem is that although the product is displayed/returned if the visitor searches for ‘1980’ the product isn’t displayed/returned on my search results if a visitor enters just ‘80’. It’s important that it is!

I’ve tried setting up a synonym, using the Search & Discovery app, for ‘80’ to show ‘1980’ but that doesnt work. It still isn’t found.

Open to any advice on a fix for this.

Thanks in advance :slightly_smiling_face:

2

Hi,

If the search is correct without any issues you can add these dates to the tags, anything in the tags searchable and can appear to the user.

Let me know if you already tried this and didn’t work out.

1 Like
3

Thank you. So Ive just tried adding 80 as the products tag to see if the product is returned when a visitor searches for ‘80’.

It didnt work :disappointed_face:

4

Can you give me access to your store so I can take a look to have a better understanding of the problem ?

1 Like
5

Ahh - it’s because I didnt have ‘search by tag’ selected in theme settings so your solution worked. Thank you so much! :slightly_smiling_face:

6

Glad that I could help please mark it as accepted solution for others to benefit, and don’t hesitate to text me to ask about anything else.

Have a nice day.

1 Like