Hopefully this is a general knowledge question (Developing on NOP for 2 weeks)

I have inherited a test (not live) NOP 3.7 website which uses NOP instant search plugin.

The website search seems to look through other names of products and provide a filtered list, so you can have search results for products with different names or codes. (so typing S112A would show product but not with that code)

I've taken an export of the old 3.7 database. Ran the upgrade scripts to 3.8 then 3.9 without error.
Installed Nop instant search.
Copied the source code to 3.9 and can run the website in IIS express and everything works the same..
EXCEPT for search - it works with simple product searches and displays the images but does not seem to search through any other linked names/codes.

How can i correct this ? I have checked all settings they all seem to the same.
What places should i look in to find common search functions?

Thanks for any advice.