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I agree with you one hundred percent Dr Pete. Thanks for your detailed insight. Always helps

These pages that produce soft 404 errors don't show products at all because these people search for our products that are not available.

You could also look at using the meta robots = noindex tag on /search/ pages, rather than just blocking it in robots.txt, as this will remove existing URLs from the index.

Thanks guys for your inputs. By the way, this issue is already resolved last year. Thanks again!