A set of links pointing from one tool into entries on a reference page used a ?term= value to open the right entry. Several of them opened the page’s generic search instead. No error appeared anywhere, and the build and type checks all passed.
A Deep Link With a Slightly Wrong Name Opens the Search Box, Not the Entry
⚡ Quick Fix (TL;DR)
The Culprit: The page matches the name exactly (ignoring capitalization) and, by design, falls back to plain search when nothing matches. That kind of graceful fallback hides typos. The names in the link list had been written from a summary of the catalog, so a few were near-misses: "Missing Title Tag" where the entry is called "Missing Title," and "HTTPS Migration" where no entry exists under that name.
The Fix: Checked every link name against the real list of entry names, corrected the misses, and removed the links that had no honest match. The takeaway: when a lookup fails quietly, nothing downstream will tell you. Verify names against the source list itself, not a summary of it, and treat "it loads" as different from "it lands on the right thing."
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