Search and discovery features

Help customers quickly find products, collections, blog posts, and pages in your store with instant predictive results, typo tolerance, and advanced search features designed for a seamless shopping experience.

Last updated 4 months ago

Helpful links

  1. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/search-and-discovery

  2. https://shopify.dev/docs/api/ajax/reference/predictive-search#supported-languages

  3. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/storefront-search/search-behavior#search-syntax

  4. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/search-and-discovery/search#semantics

  5. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/storefront-search/search-behavior#prefix-search

  6. https://apps.shopify.com/search-and-discovery

Overview

Storefront search is a powerful built-in tool that lets your customers search through all your store’s products, blog posts, and pages. Our themes leverage the most advanced features to provide a seamless and enjoyable search experience for every customer.

Predictive search

Predictive search suggests results as customers type. This feature helps shoppers find what they want faster, without having to move to a separate results page. As users type, they instantly see suggested products, collections, blog posts, and more.

You can further enhance predictive search using the Search & Discovery app. Our themes fully support and showcase these modern enhancements.

💡 Tip: Predictive search guides your customers with relevant results the moment they begin typing — and with our themes, it looks and works flawlessly.

Considerations for predictive search

These are important details about predictive search:

  1. Predictive search is available on these plans:

    1. Shopify

    2. Advanced

    3. Plus

  2. By default, only the 10 most relevant results are shown as suggestions.

    1. Customers can always view more options on your search results page.

  3. Your published theme must support predictive search.

    1. All of our themes are fully compatible and always kept up to date.

    2. Developers can use the Predictive Search API to add or customize in custom storefronts.

  4. Language support is determined by your store’s primary locale.

    1. Collection suggestions show in your store’s main language.

    2. Query suggestions are available in English only, and the store and customer session must both use English.

    3. Not all languages are supported. Check the supported language list for details.

Predictive search behavior

Predictive search provides results from several types of content:

  1. Query results

    • These show suggested terms from your product catalog or recent popular searches. Choosing one directs the customer to a full search results page.

  2. Products, pages, blog posts, and collections

  3. You can choose which types of results to show with the Search & Discovery app.

Searchable properties

By default, predictive search checks the following properties to match results:

  1. Products

    • Title

    • Product type

    • Variant title

    • Vendor

  2. Pages

    • Title

  3. Collections

    • Title

  4. Blog posts

    • Title

📝 Note: If you’re comfortable with code, you can use the Predictive Search API to adjust how many results appear or to search in extra properties.

Searchable translations

You can translate your store’s content using apps like Translate & Adapt. For the most current details, refer to the Predictive Search API developer documentation.

Supported languages

The options and features in storefront search depend on your store’s primary language. Some important search features, such as typo tolerance and search stemming, are only offered for select languages:

  1. English

    • Typo tolerance and search stemming supported.

  2. French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Finnish, Norwegian, Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Vietnamese, Croatian, Indonesian, Latvian, Estonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Catalan, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Faroese, Albanian, Bosnian, Afrikaans, Macedonian, Armenian, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Welsh, Gaelic, Moldovan, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil)

    • Typo tolerance supported.

  3. Japanese

    • Search stemming and trigram support built for katakana, hiragana, and kanji.

💡 Tip: Using Japanese? Trigram search allows customers to find products by searching three-character sequences — even kanji in pairs.

Search syntax

Certain features work differently if a customer uses search syntax:

  1. Typo tolerance is not available with search syntax.

  2. Predictive search is skipped when using search syntax.

  3. Semantic understanding does not apply to searches using syntax.

Singular and plural search terms

Storefront search recognizes both singular and plural versions of keywords, thanks to stemming. For instance, searching for puppies will also bring up "puppy" or "puppies" in your results.

  • Example: A search for body:leggings will match products with "leg" and "leggings."

  • Prefix search is available for partial matches using the beginning of a word or phrase.

Typo tolerance

Typo tolerance makes it easy for customers to find items, even if they make small typing mistakes.

  1. Results will show words with one letter different or two letters swapped.

  2. Customers must get at least the first four letters right.

    1. Example: Searching for chocollate still suggests "chocolate" and "chocolates."

  3. Typo tolerance does not handle alternate spellings. Use the Search & Discovery app to build synonym groups.

  4. Typo tolerance covers only specific properties:

    1. Product: title, product type, variant title, vendor

    2. Pages: author, title

    3. Blog posts: author, title

💡 Tip: Create synonym groups in the Search & Discovery app to ensure even alternate spellings bring up the right results.

Using AND, OR, and NOT operators

Customers can fine-tune searches using logical operators:

  1. AND

    • Every searched word must appear in the results.

    • Example: artichoke hearts or artichoke AND hearts shows both together.

  2. OR

    • At least one of the typed words must appear.

    • Example: artichoke OR hearts

  3. NOT

    • Exclude results containing the next word by adding a minus sign.

    • Example: artichoke -heart

Prefix search

A prefix search gives results that begin with exactly what the shopper is typing.

  • Typing artich finds "artichoke."

  • Typing artichoke hea shows "artichoke hearts."

Phrase search

Using double quotes lets customers search for an exact phrase.

  • Example: "artichoke hearts" will only match results with that precise phrase.

Searching specific fields

To make a search more precise, users can type a field name, a colon, and the search term.

  • Example: title:artichoke looks only for "artichoke" in titles.

  • Misspellings don’t work for field-specific search; e.g., title:artichoqe gets no results.

Field-specific search can be applied to these areas:

  1. Products

    • body

    • product type

    • tag

    • title

    • variants barcode

    • variants sku

    • variants title

    • vendor

  2. Pages

    • author

    • body

    • title

  3. Blog posts

    • author

    • body

    • tag

    • title

Trigram

📝 Note:Trigram search is available only for stores using Japanese as their primary language.

Trigram search returns results for any three (or more) consecutive characters in katakana, hiragana, or kanji.

  • Example with "アップルグリーンラップドレス": customers can search using any of these:

    1. ップル

    2. アップル

    3. ップルグリーンラ

⚠️ Important: Our modern themes are built to maximize every advanced search feature — giving your shoppers the fastest and smartest experience possible!