Why do website search results keep showing random, irrelevant stuff?
Keyword-based search systems frequently return unrelated listings or repetitive content that users never interacted with. This forces people to scroll past irrelevant results just to find what they actually searched for, making standard website search feel outdated and broken.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1tuning search plugins like Relevanssi
- 2considering creating a custom plugin for meaning-based AI/vector-powered search
- 3scrolling past unrelated results to eventually find some matching items
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Whenever I search for something, it doesn’t show me what I’m looking for. It just shows me a bunch of tarot readings and witches that I have never interacted with before and it’s always the same one.”source ↗
“It happens with everything I search and I’ve never had this problem before.”source ↗
“It’s really starting to annoy me because only after scrolling for a bit will I find some of what I actually searched before it goes back to these random listings.”source ↗
“Relevanassi search results are ok after a lot of tuning, but I still see many irrelevant results for common search terms and keyword based search feels outdated.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 7Why does my store and brand name disappear in AI search?
- 3Why is Google not indexing new content on my site?
- 2How to make Shopify search look inside page body text
- 4How to find a product online when you don't know the name
- 5How to stop juggling bookmarks for admin tools and reference sites
- 4How to figure out what an unknown bug in your house is