I help run several Shopify stores and the internal search feature on all of them sucks so badly I just resort to manually scrolling through all of the pages and posts instead of trying to find what I’m looking for with the search feature. I don’t understand how this can be so terrible. Is it a different team working on it than on all of the other Shopify features?
Hey, @Everett_Sizemor .
Tira here.
Thanks for your feedback. I’m sorry to hear that this is happening. What was it that you were searching for? I would love to know more so that I can help.
Talk soon,
Really, all you have to do is log into a shopify store and try to find some
pages. That’s it. Just do that and you’ll see.
Seriously, it’s disgustingly terrible. Billion+ dollar “innovative” corporation cant create basic features for their own tools. Jeeeeeeez.
@Everett_Sizemor , @Yevgeniy_Vaysbe
Note first and foremost Shopify is an ecommerce system, CMS is a second class feature.
I.e. it’s more tuned for searching product data than blog content.
For in-depth Content Management System consider a full fledged blog system like Wordpress.
Try the advanced syntax
- https://shopify.dev/api/usage/search-syntax
- https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/storefront-search
- https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/admin-search
- https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/searching-filtering
Beyond that without getting in super specific details about: what your searching, what the result should be, and what you are getting or not getting; there is very little guidance or support that can be given.
Maybe you’d be better off reading the comments from others who agree that this is a problem, rather than pretending it’s the user’s fault.
This isn’t just about blog posts or pages either. The Product search function isn’t any better.
@Everett_Sizemor The product search is incredibly robust as long as you know the advance syntax from the documenation links I provided.
Regardless when you want to see movement on issues it’s important to provide concrete examples rather than allusions; such as what terms you are searching, examples of product data, etc.
I’m a developer so I know the value of specifics. But in this case, the comment about “just try it” is basically as specific as anyone needs to be. Here’s a concrete example anyway.
My shop has a couple thousand products. In the admin panel under Products (filter products) I search for the term “skinnies”. Black city skinnies shows up as the 17th item below 15 other items that don’t have anything even close to “skinnies” in the title or any other attribute… oh, but the 15th item is “Basic Black Skinny Jeans”. So I guess a partial match should take precedence. There’s several products with “skinnies” in the name further down, too.
Maybe partial matches are too hard. Searching for the exact product name “black city skinnies” moves the target product to a respectable 4th place, behind three completely unrelated items.
I’m sure there are some robust search mechanisms here, but shouldn’t a simple title search work too?
I think the products query algorithm would be a lot better if it weighted titles above all other fields - or would be a lot better, if perhaps, we as developers, could supply parameters that could decide field prioritization (title, body, types etc.).
This has not been improved at all. We have inquired a few times but they never come back with any solutions. Whatever the word you search, 100+ of non related things come up to the top. Really hope they fix this.
This is my experience with the search on the products and inventory pages - by all my attempts to use it it’s basically useless.
I can search for the exact name of a product, and the results will include 50 other products with one or more of those keywords in the product description before the relevant product.
I notice the search results can only be sorted by title, SKU or availability - why is there no way to sort by search relevance?
I think there are a few ways this could easily be improved:
- Allow search queries to be limited to product names (if there’s a syntax for this, it’s not detailed anywhere I can see)
- Weight search matches in product titles over matches in descriptions / other fields
- Allow sorting search results by match relevance
Internal Shopify search often feels “bad” because it’s built to match products based on titles and basic relevance, not on how customers actually search or what products drive revenue.
Shoppers use partial names, shorthand, size variations, or informal language, while the search system expects exact catalog terms, which leads to zero results or technically correct but commercially wrong listings.
On top of that, Shopify’s default search doesn’t naturally prioritize best sellers or high-converting products for broad, high-intent queries, so strong products can end up buried under less relevant ones.
The result is a search experience that works mechanically but fails in practice, creating frustration for customers and quietly hurting conversions rather than supporting product discovery.
I also faced this same problem a few weeks ago, and found this article on google its solve most of my problem How to Fix Search on a Shopify Plus Store.
Same issue here. The problem is Shopify weighs title and description equally — so searching “skinnies” returns 50 products that mention “black” in the description before the actual “Black City Skinnies” product.
Synonyms in the Search & Discovery app help a bit, but if you’re above 1k products it’s not enough. We ended up switching to an AI-based search and the difference was immediate.