Search Bar Not Working

On 2/28/2023 at 7:51 AM, paul2009 said:

Please contact Squarespace Customer Care directly. The forum community would love to help but we are unable to resolve this.

We've been reporting this exact bug to Customer Care for years now.. their response is the same - engineering is taking a look at it... so the conclusion to me is that a fix isn't possible due to it breaking other things or they don't deem search functionality inside a squarespace site to be a core function?

😃 Possible search solution 😃

Hi everyone,

I have been a web developer for 20 years and having just spent months helping a client build up a new e-commerce website on Squarespace, I was super frustrated by the lack of a working search - something I had expected to just work.

I looked into alternatives, like Google search and Bing search, but they just don't update their indexes frequently enough. If I add a new product, I want to know it will be found in the search immediately, not possibly in the next few weeks or months.

So, I decided to take on the challenge of finding a solution and have managed to build a website crawler that works with the Meilisearch search engine along with a simple search bar that mimics the Squarespace search page.

You're welcome to have a look at the search on my clients' website. Try searching for things like "pressure washers" or "microfibre cloth". You will notice how fast the search is. It is typo-tolerant, so it doesn't matter if you mis-spell something slightly. And the site is crawled every 3 hours, so the search is always up-to-date.

Meilisearch is free to use within the following limits:

• Up to 100k documents (each page is split into multiple documents, but as a guide, our site has 321 pages, which translates to just over 4000 documents. So plenty of room there)
• 10k monthly searches

After that, it is $0.25 for every additional 1000 searches or documents.

I am not affiliated with Meilisearch in anyway.

---

Update (14 Jul 23): Meilisearch Cloud no longer offer a free tier unfortunately, but as "Addcontext" pointed out below, the Meilisearch engine can be hosted on many different platforms (we now host it for our client). I have been trying to reach out to Squarespace directly because I believe the solution I have could be implemented internally to solve the problem for everyone and what I have built so far is just a simple implementation of what is possible.

---

The software that crawls the website and sends all the content into Meilisearch for indexing is something I have built and is running on my company servers. For that reason, I cannot give this away for free, but I'd like to know how many people are interested in this solution, because if I can provide this as a service at a reasonable price I think we could all benefit.

If anyone likes what they see and are interested, please DM me on Twitter @bgurney

This is technically similar to the Bing solution I used on one website which continues to work well. Bing indexes the blogs very quickly and the rest of the website every three hours or less, which is adequate for most websites. The results are more useful than what is shown in BenWebHappen (albeit impressive) workaround. 

Geek note: My (Microsoft) Bing search solution is deployed on the (Microsoft) Azure platform. Meilisearch can also be deployed on Azure. https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/cookbooks/azure

For the record, on the websites that I have the Squarespace search function is adequate–when it works, which is all too often not the case. Indeed, not working now seems to be the standard situation on Squarespace's search functionality. It appears to have gone from bad to worse, giving "no results" when it should not.

That someone as talented as BenWebHappen had to spend his time for this client on Squarespace to do this is sad and does not speak well of Squarespace's caring or competence. 

Squarespace's search needs to be dependable. It needs to work every time. When it does work, it's ok. But it is often not working, coming back with "no results" or "document is not found" when it should not. Typically if you try searching again and again it eventually wakes up and provides some useful results. And sometimes it works the first time but that is the exception.

Here is a new page I just set up that anyone can play with to see how uneven Squarespace's search functionality can be. This is a small hobby site I have where the search is only on the blog. "Quick view" is turned off. When it works, it's good.

https://wbb-addcontext.squarespace.com/wbb-search

I've been having the same problem on one of my client's sites which is on 7.0

Can anyone confirm if this ongoing search problem has been fixed on 7.1?

45 minutes ago, tyler2 said:

Can anyone confirm if this ongoing search problem has been fixed on 7.1?

It has not.

I assume this is because v7.1 probably evolved out of v7.0 and so many of the backend elements are the same.

Just looked and the original post is from 9th June 2020 - so literally over 3 years ago and this hasn't been fixed. That is amazing - how can you charge for a faulty product for so long?

Having the same issue - sometimes it works other times nothing is returned from simple text blocks. It's frustrating and clearly won't ever get resolved.

Hi all, just a quick update from me.

Unfortunately Meilisearch Cloud no longer offer a free tier, but as "Addcontext" pointed out, the Meilisearch engine can be hosted on many different platforms (we now host it for our client). I have been trying to reach out to Squarespace directly because I believe the solution I have could be implemented internally to solve the problem for everyone and what I have built so far is just a simple implementation of what is possible.

I've seen Squarespace apologists on this thread voicing how this is a technically complex issue to fix.  It isn't.  Especially as it has been an issue on their radar since 2019.  It simply requires them to spend some money and for whatever reason they refuse to do so.  It is a massive failing and one of several reasons why we wouldn't use them again for anything resembling an enterprise website until it is fixed.  If I have to roll my own search to use Squarespace I'll use Drupal instead.

Hi all,

Just read all the comments on this thread and was wondering if, as of today, any of you has a workaround this or knows about an easy solution to implement on Squarespace to create a working search site bar?

Third-party apps seem to be very expensive (prices going up with number of pages indexed) and cheap solutions like Google Programmable Search Engine have ads on them.  I don't know what to do anymore to get a functional search bar on my site!

If anyone has a solution, please let me know 🙂 Thanks!

We have also long lamented the lack of a functioning search bar and wonder if anyone has discovered a good solution or heard any updates from Squarespace lately? The idea of adding search bar functionality was actually a big part of our decision to update our site a number of years ago and switch to Squarespace. Thus far, it's been the number one complaint we get from our users, and understandably so, considering we have thousands of film reviews available for them to sift through. Has anyone on 7.1 had success with turning off the Quick Preview function? Or with adding a third-party search tool? 
www.filmreviewdaily.com

Thanks!
 

Folks. One option. Programmable Search Engine by Google.

Four years later. No progress. They aren’t going to fix it.

My search bar has been inconsistent for over three years and in the last year it yields zero results. I cannot even search the backend because it shows zero recipe results. I’m losing money and traffic and it’s now an absolute nightmare. I get the same garbage from support, “we are prioritizing a fix for this complicated issue bla bla”. I have been consistently emailing weekly for over three months and nothing has changed.
 

I don’t believe they will ever resolve it because they don’t need to. We are still paying our monthly fees and unless someone goes to someone higher up we will continue to get the same responses. My question is:

1) Is there a developer in this thread that can implement a custom search for us because I would like to hire someone who is familiar with this issue. 

2) Has anyone tried emailing other officers at Squarespace outside of customer service with others in this chat to move this issue up and get some real eyes on it? If not, I can, but I need to include others who have experienced the same customer service jibber. This will never be resolved going back and forth on some customer service docket.