Incorrect search results

I see this topic as Resolved. Have you managed to solve this problem?

Regards

So this has become complicated. I believe there’s some sort of conflict with the WooCommerce Product Table plugin. I was able to restore functionality to the website by disabling the product table plugin – all of the category pages now work, and I’m able to make searches that work without result pages showing every product in the database (3000+ results). There’s still an issue involving the “+” sign in product numbers – if you search for “1075+” you get three products – two of which have the digits 1075 in them. Prior to these errors starting, you could search for that 1075+ number and get just one result – you can get correct results with the product table active and if you’re looking at the results while logged in.

To try to dig further, I created a fresh staging copy of the site. The odd thing is that in the staging copy, with the Product Table plugin active, I can’t recreate any of the problems that are happening on the live site. Which makes me think perhaps there may be some type of issue with Cloudflare – as that’s the only difference between the live production site and the staging site.

Do you have any ideas where to start untangling this mystery? (note, I changed the status back to not resolved after I saw your reply.)

• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by AUMW-Jay.

Update – I checked my logs and the prior plugin that was updated was the WooCommerce Plugin Table plugin. This was updated about a week ago, which is about when the customer first started noticing display issues on some computers (but not all of them – they reported it varied by browser (Edge/Chrome/Firefox). I chalked it up at the time as a browser issue, because I wasn’t seeing any issues, and the client has very old hardware they’re using. Now I can see in hindsight that the Product table plugin is the likely instigator of these issues, so I’m going to contact them.

Please inform me once you receive any update from them.

About that issue with 1075+ search – what product do you expect to see with this search query? Is there only one result that must appears?

So the other plugin (WooCommerce Product Table – I had a typo and called it Plugin Table, oops) support wasn’t that helpful – they suggested excluding a few CSS and JS files from WPRocket’s caching and minification – which I did, to no effect. They also said they didn’t guarantee compatibility with your search plugin – and suggested a few others https://barn2.com/kb/product-table-plugin-compatibility/. So I am currently just disabling that Product Table plugin and living with how I can style product cards with the customizer.

Ideally, a search for 1075+ would only return a single product with that exact text – but it also is now showing 1075+, 1075, and a product that contains the text 1/075. It’s not horrible, but this was working when you’re logged in, it just displays the extra results to visitors. Again, with that product table plugin activated, you either get all 3000+ products if you’re logged in, and the shop pages display nothing at all to visitors.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by AUMW-Jay.

I will check that table plugin and will try to find a solution for this issue.

About 1075+ search – the problem can be in that that plus symbol is stripped by default. So what you can try is to use the following code snippet:

add_filter( 'aws_special_chars', 'my_aws_special_chars' );
function my_aws_special_chars( $chars ) {
    unset( $chars[array_search( '+',$chars )] );
    unset( $chars[array_search( '+',$chars )] );
    return $chars;
}

You need to add it somewhere outside the plugins folder. For example, inside functions.php file of your theme or use some plugin for adding code snippets.

Also, after adding this code, you need to re-index the plugin table.