Search BUG not rendering all results for products in store website

[Creature1]

I currently have around 18 products in my shop that have the word SPIDER in the title, in the description, in the tags, in the url short cut and in the browser text info. When I search for "spider", only 11 results are showing. Seven spider related designs are nowhere to be found. Please report this bug to the developers and have them rectify the problem of the search bar not updating and indexing my entire site. 

Are bugs being reported and fixed? I feel like most of the bugs I have reported to Weebly have never been resolved. Please fix this, this is unacceptable. I advertise a new product and then someone goes to my store and attempts to use the "search" bar feature to quickly find something and it shows results that look like it isn't even listed on my site and then I lose a sale.  This service is not justifying for the BUSINESS plan. No one should be attempting to run a business on Weebly if they have more than 10 things for sale on their site because it is impossible to manage, search, and sell on this platform. How is Weebly able to justify charging me the business plan price when bugs like the search bar not showing all products to my customers and keeping me from making sales has been going for who knows how long, probably the ENTIRE time I have paid the business plan price????  The search is a necessary feature for any business selling a large quanitity of products and should be 100% reliable and operational for the price that I pay to host my shop on Weebly.  I have to work REALLY hard to make a living and managing the non stop issues that effect my ability to make online sales because of the shortcomings of this site editor and weebly's services is not something I have time for.  I spend everyday in the studio and make everything by HAND, why the hell do I have to constantly be finding out my shop is jacked up!! Take care of all of these bugs so I can focus on making things and running my business!

And because I have to account for predictable deviation tactics of Weebly to shift blame and not take responsibility for their own bugs I would like to point out that it is NOT because some of my items are "out of stock". You can clearly see that in the rendered search return that one of the items shown is indeed "out of stock". That blows the theory for that being the excuse for why all of the other spider related designs aren't showing. If it is still visible on my site to customers, it is supposed to be indexed and that search bar is supposed to crawl it and render ALL spider related products in the results. 

@Adam 

@Bernadette

results rendered when searching for spider:

PRODUCTS IN MY SHOP THAT DO NOT SHOW IN SITE SEARCH RESULTS!!!!

[Adam7]

It sounds like indexing of your site stalled for some reason. This should happen when a site is published, although sometimes it can take a while. I started a re-index of your site for you which should fix it. That might take a little while to complete, so I would give it several hours before testing just to be safe.

[Creature1]

@Adam 

Unfortunately, that did not fix the issue. Most of the "spider" listings that are not included in the search return are listings that I added to my shop YEARS ago, so it isn't a case of me adding new listings and then not having the site indexing update. They are not new listings, some are listings I added last week, others have been available through my site for years.  ReIndexing isn't a fix. Please escalate this search bar bug for a fix so that my customers can find my products when they visit my site. The search bar is not working and probably NEVER did and I just now noticed. This is something Weebly should have working for its customers that rely on their service to sell their products online. Unacceptable. 

[Adam7]

I'm checking with our QA team on this one. To compare, I searched from the Store tab for "spider" which brought up almost 30 products, vs the 11 that site search returns.

[Creature1]

I appreciate you forwarding this to anyone that can fix it. I don't know what the Q&A team is, but I hope it is full of people that actually understand how a website needs to work for businesses to actually make a living selling online. A search bar is necessary for sites that have multiple products across multiple categories. Buyers want to find what they are looking for quickly. 

It is definitely a bug and needs to be fixed immediately. Just dump this crap search bar and plug in a new one, please! I know you guys don't code.  If I had a FULL log of all of the bugs I have reported over the years and not the intentionally deceptive truncated version of recent 5 posts, I could probably even find where I have already reported this exact issue before. I know I have reported how disgusting the page of returns looks with all that garbage over to the left that Irrelevant for sure.  Why do we not have any way to control what the search bar on our website actually does? Why do we not have a search by price, or by recent etc etc???? And lastly wtf doesn't it actually even work and why aren't there any product testers at Weebly that can test a website with multiple categories and hundreds of products to make sure that such a thing is even manageable/stable on weebly. Just like with the issue with my products dropping out of categories randomly for me over and over.  It makes my life a nightmare of fighting with this site editor having so many products and updating so frequently.   I work for a living every day from 8am - 1am or later in the studio, what life I have left I don't want to be spending wiping my website's proverbial ....  That's what it feels like as a Weebly customer, though. Every time I make a new update to my site, I find some new dust bunny ridden hell hole corner that no one at Weebly knows about that I have to report.

I'm not going to pay a third party for a search bar that actually works when there is a feature that I have paid for already using Weebly as my site builder that doesn't work as it is supposed to. How many real users that use this platform to sell products does Weebly even really have if something as simple as a search bar being royal f* isn't noticed or pointed out until now. Rant over. Thank you for forwarding this, I hope this issue will be placed on some sort of normal timeline for getting fixed and not something that persists for years like most else around here.

[Adam7]

Our QA team are Quality Assurance engineers - they have a very deep knowledge of what is expected behavior with individual features, so if there's a reason something works in a specific way that is actually by design (even if it makes sense to change that), they are who I would ask. In this case I just opened a ticket with our engineers to look at this. Sometimes something makes sense when being designed, but then a real-world use-case comes up which demonstrates that it would be better designed to work in a different way. Not that that's necessarily the case here - this might be just not functioning or indexing properly.

[Adam7]

I heard back from our engineers on this, @Creature, and one part is working as designed and one part needs to be fixed:

1. By default the count of products and products that are shown do not include out of stock items. If you check that option on the left you'll see it will update the products shown to include everything except products you've hidden.

2. There is a bug where the count shown for products does not update when checking the box to include out of stock items. I'll make a separate ticket with our engineers to fix that.

Having an option in Store settings to include out of stock items by default in search results could be useful - if you have a moment I would post that to the Vote on Features board.

[Creature1]

@Adam 

1. The returns do currently show out of stock items, but apparently randomly. Please refer to my first screenshot that shows 11 returns INCLUDING one "out of stock" listing shown.  So if it is supposed to only show "available" items as the default, that apparently isn't working either. 

2. whatever other bug you found that you created a ticket for, good, hope it gets fixed since you forwarded it. Can you forward the bug I reported and also explain why it is a problem with the way it currently is working. I really feel like Weebly was only designed for sellers of very few items for sale. No handmade shop with hundreds of items can thrive on Weebly the way every function falls short of our needs.

3. The cluster * that is the left hand side of the screen is not someting most buyers will EVER use. It looks awful and insane. 

I will create a new post in the vote on features for the search bar results to DEFAULT to an ALL view which will include out of stock, which is literally how it should work already. 

Thanks for forwarding the bugs for fixes. I hope the search bar is operational in a normal way soon since I am being charged for the use of it.

[Adam7]

Thanks for providing your feedback. As a person working in customer support, I can see things from both sides - why we might have made a decision for our products and also why a consumer will see that and have a totally different perspective (like how I would love it if Netflix would use something other than that loud and jarring "bah-bump" sound every time you launch their AppleTV app).

1. I asked for information on why that one product is being included without checking the option. I didn't see anything with the product itself that should mean it's included, although maybe I missed something.

2. Hopefully the bug should get resolved soon. As for shops with a lot of products, we've been incrementally adding more bulk features to make managing larger stores easier.

3. I personally like a lot of control over filtering products when I'm buying online, although I agree it would be good to have some control over that in the event you want to keep things simple for your customers. This would be another good one to post on Vote on Features.

[Creature1]

@Adam 

I like control when shopping too, which is why I use drop down options such as "low to high, high to low, recently added, show 25, show 50, show 100, show all" options listed at the top of  the page of most online shopping sites these days. I suggested that we have such a feature for every one of our categories in our shop, probably years ago now and nothing was ever done to offer that. So if Weebly knows buyers like using filters, someone should care about that common place feature available to most online shoppers everywhere else and make it possible on Weebly.

There is a big difference between the look of filter features on other platforms and the utter eyesore is the filter feature that Weebly offers to its customers. The fact that Weebly shop owners have zero control on how that feature is shown to our buyers is a problem. I don't want half of the info currently showing as an option to my customers. It looks like a cluster *. I never said I don't like filters, I said I don't like Weebly's. Its poorly designed.  I don't want pages to be included in results or every option of chain length  I have ever listed in my shop for necklaces to be shown. It's ridiculous, looks really unprofessional and no one uses half of that info for my shop.