Searching your store

This page was printed on Mar 02, 2021. For the current version, visit https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/os/storefront-search?itcat=partner_blog&itterm=custom_search.

The online store search is a fully featured, powerful tool for your customers to search across all of your store's products, articles, and pages.

Singular and plural search terms

Searching tries to match terms in both their singular and plural forms.

Searching for

Puppies

matches results containing "puppy" or "puppies".

Treating singular and plural terms as equivalent is an example of stemming, where a word is mapped to its common lemma (stem). Shopify's stemming also takes into account the common stem of different words.

Searching for

body:leggings

matches results containing "leg" or "leggings".

If you want to search for a word based on partial pattern matching, then use prefix search.

Typo tolerance

The online store search includes typo tolerance, which finds correct matches for search terms that contain typos.

Search results include matches that differ from the search term by 1 letter or that have 2 letters in a different order. The first 4 letters of a search term need to be entered correctly for typo tolerance to take effect.

Typo tolerance isn't applied on search results for product tags and article tags. For example, if a customer searches for chocollate then they won't receive results based on tags such as chocolate or chocolates.

The following fields support typo tolerance:

Product fields

  • title
  • product_type
  • variants.title
  • vendor

Article fields

  • author
  • title

Page fields

  • author
  • title

Using AND, OR and NOT operators

AND

All search terms are by default AND-ed together, so searching for

artichoke hearts

yields results containing both "artichoke" and "hearts". Joining operators aren't necessary.

OR

Searching for

artichoke OR hearts

yields results containing at least one of "artichoke" or "hearts".

NOT

Searching for results without a term can be done by prefixing the term with a minus sign.

artichoke -heart

matches terms with "artichoke", but not "heart".

Searching for

artich*

matches terms that begin with "artich".

Searching specific fields

Add a field name with a colon to your search term to narrow your search for that term to the specified field.

For example:

title:artichoke

searches for titles that include the term "artichoke".

Searching for a misspelt word won't work when searching specific fields, since search looks for an exact match.

For example: 

title:artichoqe

doesn't yield any results.

Searchable properties

Depending on the type of search, results can be based on different searchable properties.

Type of search Searchable properties
Products
  • body
  • product_type
  • tag
  • title
  • variants.barcode
  • variants.sku
  • variants.title
  • vendor
Pages
  • author
  • body
  • title
Articles
  • author
  • body
  • tag
  • title

Placing a search term between double quotes ("") searches for that exact word or phrase in one of the searchable fields.

For example:

"artichoke hearts"

matches a product with the title "Can of artichoke hearts", but not a product with the title "Canned hearts of artichoke".

Locale

The store's primary locale affects which search version you get.

Supported languages

The following table indicates which search behaviors are provided for the supported languages:

Language Typo tolerance Search stemming Trigram
English ✔ ✔
French ✔
Spanish ✔
Portuguese (Brazil) ✔
German ✔
Dutch ✔
Italian ✔
Japanese ✔ ✔
Can support Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji
Danish ✔
Swedish ✔
Portuguese (Portugal) ✔
Finnish ✔
Norwegian (Bokml) ✔
Turkish ✔
Romanian ✔
Hungarian ✔
Russian ✔
Polish ✔
Czech ✔
Greek ✔
Icelandic ✔
Lithuanian ✔
Slovenian ✔
Slovak ✔
Bulgarian ✔
Vietnamese ✔
Croatian ✔
Indonesian ✔
Latvian ✔
Estonian ✔
Serbian ✔
Ukrainian ✔
Catalan ✔
Norwegian (Nynorsk) ✔
Faroese ✔
Portuguese ✔
Albanian ✔
Bosnian ✔
Afrikaans ✔
Macedonian ✔
Armenian ✔
Serbo-Croatian ✔
Latin ✔
Welsh ✔
Gaelic ✔
Moldovan ✔

Japanese locale

The Japanese local supports search stemming and Trigram search, but doesn't support typo tolerance.

Trigram

For Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji, search will match any consecutive sequence of at least 3 characters.

For example, you can find "アップルグリーンラップドレス" by searching for any of the following terms:

ップル

or

アップル

or

ップルグリーンラ

Kanjis can also be found in pairs of two.

Searching for products, pages, and articles

Products, pages, and articles need to have certain settings in place in order to be searchable.

Products

To make a product searchable, do the following steps:

Pages

To make a page searchable, do the following steps:

Articles

To make an article searchable, do the following steps:

You can customize your theme code to change the way that search results appear in your online store. To learn more, refer to Customizing search.

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