Read this blog on Swiftype site search no results for more information.
For site, owners thinking about their internal search engines, the prospect of users seeing a “no results” page is a major fear. No results pages frustrate users and make them leave your site—if a site-wide search doesn’t populate results for their query, who can blame these users for assuming that this website doesn’t offer the content they are looking for?
From the perspective of the site owner, a “no results” page means one of two things: (i) either the website search engine is not powerful enough to find relevant content, or (ii) the website simply doesn’t have content for that query. In both cases, these no result queries reveal key blind spots that site owners need to look closely at to improve their user experience. 
Common Errors that lead to no Results in Site Search
- Even if your webpages are configured well, the crawler mustdiscover themtoindex them. The crawler is capable of crawling HTML content: you must have at least a
<title>and<body>present. The crawler starts at your homepage and follows each discovered URL link. It repeats the process for each link it crawls until all of your interlinked pages have been indexed. If it is unable to discover a page via linking, like the red page above, then that page is not indexed. - If your documents are not being indexed, you may have restrictive path rules. Click on theDomainstab to bring up your list of crawled websites and confirm this. If you notice that you are not indexing pages from your main website or a specific website, click on theManage dropdown next to the website, and then select Manage Crawl Rules. There are two lists that contain rules: a whitelist and a blacklist. If you have paths within your blacklist, those pages will not be indexed
- Your website code may be written in a way that obscures or prevents crawling. Ensure that the following are in good order:
- 404 vs. 200 Responses
- Canonical URLs
- Cookie Dependency
- Duplicate Documents
- JavaScript Crawling
- Out-dated documents
- Removing Documents
- Robots.txt
- Robots meta tags
- Server-side redirects
If the Swiftype Site Search no Results issue still persists, then move on to the next step. Here we will replace Swiftype with an alternative solution.
Create a Custom Search Engine to Fix no Results in Search issue
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
