[Google Shopping API] Almost empty results

[hilmanski]

A customer reported that a search on Google Shopping returned basically empty results. It only shows one sponsored result with no shopping_results.

I suspect this is just a one-time issue since I can't replicate it on my side.

Notes:

• The customer used num for this search, but I'm not sure if that's the cause.
• The customer suspect that the cause is the missing domain, in this case: google.com.au

Internal links: Intercom | Search Inspect 1

[alexbarron]

Edit: Bumping to prioritized status as this is impacting a long-time customer's ability to demo their solution to clients.

The customer provided another example of the issue without setting a num param and including google_domain=google.com.au. However in this instance, inline_shopping_results appeared, but no shopping_results were returned despite the same query manually in Google returning normal shopping results. Inspect

Additionally I've been able to reproduce the issue; although responses vary in quality.

In one instance, I received only one sponsored result in the HTML preview, but empty JSON. This is the same as the customer's original report. Inspect

In another instance, I got nothing at all. Inspect

It's a small sample size, but most of the time this query seems to work. Unclear why it's so inconsistent. Here's what it looks like when it works:

[dsojevic]

To add some minor context here; I ran a small test of 100 searches (using the same parameters used in the examples above) and found that 7/100 had an issue with Google returning a blank result area.

It appears that the HTML we are provided in those instances is fully devoid of any product information, so it might be that we need to do a transparent retry in these instances if we can find a suitable indicator versus a search with no actual results.