Search outages are some of the most frustrating issues on content-driven sites. Pages load, links work, and nothing appears obviously broken — yet a core feature silently fails.

In this blog post, we will document a real-world Jekyll blog search outage, explain how it was diagnosed, and walk through the exact fix that restored full search functionality.

• Issue Overview
• Symptoms Observed
• Root Cause
• Investigation Notes
• Fix Applied
• Final Working State
• Conclusion

Issue Overview

The blog search feature stopped working entirely. Clicking the search icon in the bottom-right corner either did nothing or displayed an empty overlay with no results.

There were no visible page errors and no immediate JavaScript failures reported at first glance.

Symptoms Observed

The following behaviors were confirmed during investigation:

• Clicking the search icon produced no visible response
• The search overlay failed to open or opened without results
• Initial DevTools inspection showed no obvious search-related console output
• After manually adding the search script, the console reported:
  • Uncaught ReferenceError: $ is not defined

That error strongly suggested a missing JavaScript dependency.

Root Cause

The search overlay HTML exists in:

• _includes/blog_header.html

However, the JavaScript responsible for powering the overlay — including click handlers, keyboard shortcuts, and typeahead initialization — lives in:

• static/js/search.js

At some point, search.js was no longer being loaded on pages that rendered the search overlay. As a result:

• No event handlers were attached to the search icon
• The overlay could not open or close
• Typeahead search against search.json was never initialized

When search.js was manually reintroduced, it failed because it depended on jQuery ($), which was either not loaded yet or not included at all due to script ordering.

Investigation Notes

Several checks were performed using browser DevTools:

• typeof jQuery returned “function” once the correct bundles were loaded
• jQuery.fn.typeahead existed after the blog JavaScript bundle loaded
• The Network tab confirmed static/js/search.js was not initially requested
• After adding search.js, the $ is not defined error confirmed a load-order issue

Additional validation:

• https://jamisonjohnson.me/search.json returned HTTP 200 with valid JSON
• https://jamisonjohnson.me/blog/search.json returned 404

This confirmed the site was being served from the domain root (/) and not from a /blog baseurl path.

Fix Applied

The fix required explicitly restoring the JavaScript dependency chain and ensuring proper load order.

The following scripts were added to _includes/head.html:

• Main application bundle (includes jQuery)
• Blog JavaScript bundle (includes typeahead)
• Search overlay logic script

In the correct order:

• /static/assets/app-20190620.min.js
• /static/assets/blog-20190620.min.js
• /static/js/search.js

Loading search.js after the main bundles ensured all required dependencies were available.

Final Working State

Search functionality was confirmed restored when all of the following were true:

• The page loads:
  • /static/assets/app-20190620.min.js
  • /static/assets/blog-20190620.min.js
  • /static/js/search.js
• search.json returns valid content from the site root
• Clicking the search icon opens the overlay
• Typing produces live search suggestions
• Keyboard shortcuts function as expected

Conclusion

This outage was caused by a missing and incorrectly ordered JavaScript dependency chain. The search UI existed in the DOM, but the script responsible for binding behavior and initializing search was not loaded — and when it was added, it depended on jQuery being loaded first.

The resolution was to explicitly include static/js/search.js after the main JavaScript bundles and use relative_url to avoid path-related issues.