Search in admin area doesn’t work correctly

Hi @photomj

I’m familiar with your site and I’m curious to see if the cause could be a result of how products are duplicated upon creation. Not that this is the case here, but we sure will get down to this unique issue.

Hi @johndcoy

I remember your name too!

I don’t know why duplicating a product would harm/throw off a basic search result?!

The erroneous products that DO show up in a search, weren’t created from the products I am searching for. Like, if I create a new Night Light, I will use an older listing to duplicate and use. I don’t duplicate an entirely different product, to create a new listing.

It makes sense to duplicate products if the listing is basically the same.

I already sent login info for the staging site to the Woo Team, so hopefully someone can check it out.

Thanks for responding here.

Mj

I opened this thread two weeks and three days ago…

I shared my staging site credentials with Woo Commerce over two days ago….

Tick Tock…Tick Tock…

As usual, Woo Commerce isn’t offering any sort of “real” help.

Hello @photomj,

My apologies for the late reply and for not explaining the problem well previously.

I did some testing and can confirm this is not a problem/bug, I’ve even recorded a video for you here to explain it further (please increase the volume): https://monosnap.com/file/5oDow2IlFhalTah00ASCphIIt66sJB

A couple of notes that I forgot to mention in the video.

• First, although you might find that returning these other products is a design flow but is actually the opposite and can be really helpful if you forgot the title of the product and want to search for it with something you’ve written in the description.
• I found the following plugin on GitHub to limit the search to titles only, I tested it on my site and can confirm it works but since this is not made by us please install it at your own risk and make sure to read the licensing file.

If you feel something could be done better here in terms of the search functionality, you can create and issues report about from here. Please note that issue reports are not limited just to bugs, you can make suggestions as well.

Hope this helps!

I opened this post over two weeks ago.

It has now been over three days since I shared staging credentials with Woo Commerce and no one has responded yet.

Instead, Saif, who has been confused about this issue, and who provided ridiculous answers before, has answered the thread AGAIN.

Saif – apparently you don’t work in the “real,” practical world, since once again, the explanations you have provided make no sense whatsoever.

#1 – If I need to remove a product from stock, or change a products price, then OBVIOUSLY I KNOW THE PRODUCTS NAME. Why would I search for “some word” I might have written within the post/listing itself, to find the product?! This happens to no one, ever.

#2 – You wrote in a previous response: “Also note, this is not how WooCommerce works but rather posts in WordPress.” Again, you are wrong. If I search within a WordPress site, I get correct search results. Woo Commerce, which is built on WordPress Architecture, SHOULD work the same, and it does work better, on other websites of mine, but NOT this one.

#3 – Searches, in general, and indexing, are prioritized by on-page SEO (i.e., Title Tags, how high in priority, an element is, on a page.) This means that when I search for the TITLE of an item, that TITLE, since it is in an H1 tag, should be returned FIRST, in the search results. Page TITLE is the HIGHEST PRIORITY for searches. Random words, sprinkled into descriptions, do not score a higher return rate. Also, part of a word, that is encapsulated into another word (i.e., the word “light” in “enlightenment” shouldn’t be returned as a result, at all.) If it is returned as a search result, then that is just bad programming on Woo’s part.

While it’s wonderful that you FINALLY figured out to do a test search, in an actual admin area (instead of the web page itself, as you previously had done), your results are NOT what is happening on my website, which is why I opened this ticket over two weeks ago, and why I provided Woo Commerce with admin access to a staging site, as they requested.

If you, or anyone from Woo, ever took the time to actually go into that staging area, you would see that if you search for “Night Light” there, it returns 25 extraneous products, that DO NOT have the word “Night” or “Light” in the titles. The five actual products, that DO HAVE the word “Night Light” in the H1 tag of the title, show up on page 2, after 25 products that have the “night” somewhere in the body of the description.

This is a Woo Commerce search problem that needs to be resolved. I really don’t have the time to keep reading these ridiculous attempts at solutions, that you are providing, because they aren’t solutions at all.

Hi there @ photomj,

Thanks for the additional reply, with detailed responses.

Pleae be aware that this is a public forum, and although I do understand your frustration, please be aware of ythe tone of your responses, as we are all human, trying to help out where we can.

#1
Not everyone’s store may be the same as yours. Some users have thousands of products, so may well forget the title of a specific product.

#2 & 3
WooCommerce products are modified post-types on WordPress, so they do in fact work the same, in terms of search functionality.
If you take a search on your site for night light, you get more than your 5 items, 24, in fact. Your SEO will just sort these by relevane on the front-page:
https://d.pr/i/Oo5osD

#Solution
A rather simple solution is to add a set of quotation marks around your product search query. night light and "night light" will return very different queries:

https://d.pr/i/TPrte4

This can also be replicated on the backend:
https://d.pr/i/JiZeDv

Do let me know if this search tip has helped you in your query.

Regards,
Sven

Hi Sven –

Sorry for the “tone” but seriously? After three weeks now, am I supposed to be “happy and cheerful” about the “support” that Woo Commerce has offered?

In response to your numbers above:

#1 – If someone has thousands of products, on a Woo Commerce site, they are basically SOL if they want to try and find a product. Products can’t be found on my site, that only has 700 products.

#2 & #3 – Again, you are wrong. The search functionality does NOT work the same on this website of mine. If you search on the main website, and search for ‘Night Light’, the 5 Lights show up FIRST. Then other extraneous listings show after that. If you search in the admin area, 25 OTHER products show first, with the 5 Night Lights on the 2nd page.

Also, you guys keep showing me how to search on the main website. That is NOT the problem here. The problem is within the Woo Commerce area, INSIDE the theme. So, to keep on giving examples of how search works on the actual website, is a waste of time.

#4 Solution – I did try the quote marks, and that did work within the admin area. That being said, it took THREE WEEKS, and how many support reps, for someone to provide that solution?

While the quote marks do work, I have never used that or seen that happen INSIDE of a website. Using quote marks like that was an old school search thing used on search engines (back in the day.)

Also, Woo Commerce does NOT work the same with searches in the admin area, as WordPress does, as I have clearly shown on this ticket. I have another WordPress Blog, that does NOT have Woo Commerce on it, and if I search for anything in the admin area, it returns exact search results.

So, there IS a problem with the search functionality with Woo Commerce in the admin area.

Hi there @photomj,

Thank you for trying the search with the quotation marks. I’m glad to hear that it was at least a semi-working solution for you.

I’ll only be focusing on your queries that I have an answer to.

* As this is a core WooCommerce problem, the code is publicly available on GitHub.

* There is an issue open under the search term "search by title".

https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/30915

* I encourage you to look through the GitHub repository, and subscribe to this issue to be notified when the Core version of WooCommerce makes any updates to this issue.

—

To show that the quotation marks are still at play just about everywhere on the internet, when searching for this term on GitHub without them, there are 85 open and 728 closed issues: https://d.pr/i/4bYeWP
Adding the quotation marks, drops this down to 3 and 7, respectively:
https://d.pr/i/rMDtKy

—

I’m going to mark this issue as resolved, as you can follow the open issue on GitHub, and alternately, use the method of quotation marks within your WordPress and WooCommerce dashboards until a fix is implemented.

All data within a product is indexed in a search and the order of the results are based on the date the product was created. This results in older products that match the search being listed after products that just contain any combination of the words in their descriptions or title.

I’ve created an enhancement request:

https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/35607

For now, anyone can use quotations around text to minimize bloat results for more specific searched.

@johndcoy – THANK YOU!

That makes total sense and thanks for creating the enhancement request.

YOU are the best.

Mj

Hi @photomj

You are very much welcome.

Please subscribe to the thread to keep you posted for updates.

Thanks!

I think this is a WordPress Admin search problem. I have same problem with Pages. 100s of articles/pages, and when I search for a term, I get my expected 2-3 results jumbled into 40 other non-relevant results.

Should be an option to only search title. Strange no-one has fixed this yet.

Makes finding the correct page to edit very time-consuming for an Admin.

Hi @torgrim,

I understand your point, this is a valid feedback.

Please note, an enhancement request is created in order for the developers to evaluate it. In the meantime, you can use the quotations around the text for your search results to show more accurate information.

I hope this helps.