Search behavior in your online store
The online store search uses different factors in and several built-in behaviors for handling search terms to return accurate and relevant results from your products, pages, and blog posts.
On this page
Considerations for online store search
Review the following considerations and requirements for search behavior on your online store.
Apps
Apps that modify your theme or that have search capabilities might impact the built-in online store search:
- If you're using a third-party search app to generate search results, then the search behaviors and capabilities of Shopify's built-in search might not apply to search results on your online store. To learn more about how your third-party search app works, contact the app's developer.
- Third-party apps that modify your theme's search template might impact search results on your online store.
- You can manage and improve your search results by managing the visibility of products, pages and blog posts, and by customizing your online store search results with the Shopify Search & Discovery app. Learn more about managing searchability and using the Search & Discovery app.
Semantic search
Semantic search capability in your online store search is available only if your store meets the following requirements:
- Your store has fewer than 200,000 products.
- Your store is on one the following pricing plans:
- Shopify
- Advanced
- Plus
- Semantic search capability doesn't apply to predictive search.
Search syntax
The following search behaviors don't apply to searches that use search syntax:
- Typo tolerance
- Predictive search
- Semantic understanding
Supported languages
Your store's primary locale affects which search behaviors you get.
| Language | Typo tolerance | Search stemming | Semantic capability | Trigram |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| French | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Spanish | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Portuguese (Brazil) | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| German | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Dutch | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Italian | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Japanese | ✔ | ✔ Can support Katakana, hiragana, and kanji. | ||
| Danish | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Swedish | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Portuguese (Portugal) | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Finnish | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Norwegian (Bokmål) | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| 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 | ✔ | ✔ |
Singular and plural search terms
The online store search 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 one letter or that have two letters in a different order. The first four letters of a search term need to be entered correctly for typo tolerance to take effect.
For example, search for chocollate, will return results that have chocolate or chocolates in the title or description.
Typo tolerance isn't applied on all fields when creating search results. For example, chocollate wouldn't match on any product tags of blog post tags of chocolate. The following resource fields support typo tolerance:
| Resource type | Supported fields | Products |
|
|---|---|
| Pages |
|
| Blog posts |
|
Search syntax
Search syntax determines how search terms are treated when Shopify searches for results.
Using AND, OR and NOT operators
AND
Searching for results with the AND operator between search terms returns results when all search
terms are in the result.
By default, all search terms are treated as having AND between them. Searching for artichoke hearts or
artichoke AND hearts both yield results containing both "artichoke" and "hearts". Joining operators aren't necessary.
OR
Searching for results with the OR operator between search terms returns results when any search
term is a result.
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 (-).
Searching for artichoke -heart matches terms with "artichoke", but not "heart".
Prefix search
Prefix search will return results where the search term matches the beginning of other terms in results. Prefix search occurs automatically on all searches.
Searching for artich matches terms that begin with "artich", like "artichoke". This also works on the last term of a search. Searching for artichoke hea matches terms that begin with "artichoke hea".
Phrase search
Placing a search term between double quotes ("") searches for that exact word or phrase in one of the searchable fields.
Searching "artichoke hearts" matches a product with the title "Can of artichoke hearts", but not a product with the title "Canned hearts of artichoke".
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, searching for 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, searching for title:artichoqe doesn't yield any results.
Depending on the resource you're searching for (product, page, blog post), results can be based on different searchable properties.
| Resource | Searchable properties | Products |
|
|---|---|
| Pages |
|
| Blog posts |
|
Semantic understanding
The online store search includes semantic understanding. Semantic search is one of Shopify's AI-powered online store search behaviors that uses related words, concepts, categories and other contexts to improve and expand search results.
The online store search's semantic understanding checks for related words and categories, and relationships between concepts.
Semantic understanding uses attributes of your products such as the product's description, and image data, such as text that's part of the image itself and colors, to improve search results.
For example, you have an online store that sells shoes in different styles and for different occasions. A customer searches for christmas party shoes. You don't have any products that use the terms christmas or party anywhere in your products, but you do sell pumps that come in multiple colors, including red.
Instead of returning only search results containing the words christmas, party, or shoes, your online store search results expand to include related products by associating related terms. For example, christmas is associated with the colors green and red, and party shoes can be associated with common shoe styles for parties, such as pumps.
As a result, the red pumps display in the customer's search results.
Trigram
Trigram search matches any consecutive sequence of at least three characters in katakana, hiragana, and kanji. You can also search kanji in pairs. For example, you can search for "アップルグリーンラップドレス" by entering any of the following terms:
ップルアップルップルグリーンラ