Wrong search results on lice site, correct ones in staging area

Dear support,

I nearly finished my website when another error popped up. At least it’s an interesting one:

I have my website hostet at WPEngine. The offer a staging area where you can work on problems or improvements without affecting the life site.

I had my install finished in this staging area and everything was running fine. I moved it back to the life site (which makes an exact copy of the install) – and suddenly the search delivered wrong results. Instead of the one correct result in my example below, it lists pretty much all posts.

Since both install are exact copies of each other, the error must be caused by the way GeoDirectory (or something that is affecting GD) reacts to the conditions of the live environment.

I talked to the WPEngine guys and asked for the differences between the staging and the live areas, so that you can maybe track the problem down. Here is what they said:

The main difference between staging and live is that the staging environment is a completely uncached environment, whereas the live environment is cached. It may be that we need to exclude a certain element of the plugin from the varnish cache to get it to work.

You are welcome to relay this information to the plugin developer and let us know if there’s a cookie or file we need to exclude from caching, which we can do for the live environment.

I checked out the two links you provided and they don’t look to be set up exactly the same, with no search box listed above the search results in the live environment, whereas this is still present in the staging environment.

Please let us know if we may be of any further assistance and if the plugin developer has any recommendations as to your configuration that we can assist with, we’d be happy to check those out.
Have a great day!

MT | WordPress Mechanic
WP Engine – Finely Tuned WordPress

Indeed it is interesting that the broken results page in the life site looks a little different with the search bar missing. That must be related to the problem, because both sites are copies of each other that I just made minutes ago, without doing any changes to any of them. And the search is exactly the same as you can see in the search URL in the private reply that I will post in a second.

Do you have any recommendation what I or the WPEngine guys can do to solve this problem? Or is there something that can be done on your side?

Thank you very much for your help,
kind regards,
Tom