My Store>Search does NOT work / Contro Panel search works

[SystemsAdmin]

We have managed to load several thousand items into our store, using the Utilities>Database>Upload.

Using Products>Search from the Control Panel console we can search
for our items without a problem on any field for any item, it works fine.

We have 'Published' and 'Regenerated' several times.

Using My Store>Search nothing shows up.

Please advise.

[craig]

I too am experiencing problems with shopsite search. Search works in the backoffice but not on the customer pages. Search used to work until my site was upgraded from version 7 to 8 and then 9.

I have a hosted installation of Shopsite through Pair and they have not been able to resolve this issue. It seems like something changed in version 8 as far as Shopsite search goes.

[Jim]

In order for search to work on your store pages you must have at least one ShopSite generated page set to have a search form. You must also have the pages' "index for search" option checked. Both of these fields are found on the Pages > Edit page Content screen near the bottom.
Product Search Field: Check here to add a product search field to your page.
Index: Check here to have this page indexed for product search

Your page template also needs to have a search form on it.

Note that only ShopSite Pro and ShopSite Manager have the search feature. So if you have a Starter level store it will not have the search functionality.

[craig]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your reply. I have both of those settings checked for all my pages. I have Shopsite Pro hosted at Pair.

Shopsite search used to work on my site until it was upgraded from version 7 to version 8 and then to version 9. I think this is the key to finding the problem. What changed in version 8 with regards to the search script?

[Jim]

Although thing may have change in the search feature, nothing should have changed in the way the store search functions because of an upgrade from one version to the next. We test to make sure that thing don't break during an upgrade.

I recommend you contact Pair and have them look into the problem. If they need help they can contact the ShopSite support team for assistance.

[SystemsAdmin]

Still have the problem, we are using ShopSite Pro.

* My Store home page contains the search form.

* We have doublechecked 'index for search' as being
checked in the Pages>Edit Page Content form.

* We then re-publish/regenerate

* go to MyStore, enter a one word proper noun
search item phrase in the search field which we
have at least 300 items to match and the engine
finds nothing.

Control Panel does the same search with no problem. MyStore does not.

[Jim]

The store pages and backoffice search functionality have nothing in common so just be cause the back office finds a word doesn't mean that the store search should.

Do you perhaps have that key word excluded from being indexed in your store page search? Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing > Stop List?

Again the best resolution would be to go through your host since they have access to your server and can check things out. Other than that it is just guess work.

[SystemsAdmin]

We are hosted with Verio and they responded with a solution,
saying that we need to assign each item to a page in order for
the search engine to work.

Which raises some other questions

1. Is the search function searching the database or the pages?

2. And how do we automatically generate and assign effective pages for a
dynamic inventory of 8000-9000 items?

[Jim]

ShopSite indexes Product content based on the fields you select for indexing. It does not index any text that is on the page outside of what is in the product.

Products can be assigned to pages in the backoffice of the store either on the Add/Edit Product screens or on the Pages Assign Items screen.

Pages and Products can also be managed through uploading tab delimited or xml format files. For stores with lots of pages and products most merchants use this method.

[craig]

I am making some headway on my problem thanks to some help from a Pair tech.

In my store I have used a product to act as a category for my actual products which are listed as subproducts under this category product. The search destination field for this category product was set to none which is why nothing was showing up in the search. The only problem with this is that the search results now include not only the product with the search term but also all of the other subproducts listed under the category product.

How can I exclude the products that don't include the search term from the search results?

[Jim]

Have you tried enabling the option "Ignore Subproducts during indexing:" on Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing screen?

In your search product template you could eliminate the Loop Subproducts option.

Don't know if either of those will do what you want but they might.