It does help when you can only partially remember the name
That feature existed before. It was improved. But it still is title matching. It now matches url and creator display names too. Short description was matched before, but as far as I observed, if it could fill the results with title matches, those usually had more relevance.
The number of results seems capped more than before. It was something like x = exact title matches + 60 or less. It seems now to be x = 60 or less with exact title matches no longer leading the results, nor being mandatory included.
Also, the relevance ordering seems kinda strange.
If you type neighbor, it will show you the game "That's not my Neighbor" in suggestions starting with "ne" already. But the search
https://itch.io/search?q=neighbor
does not even have that game in the results (currently). And "neighbor" is the only real noun in that title.
The game will show up for "that's", and even for "that". But it currently does not show up for "thats". So much for the typo correction. It does show up for "thats not my", but since the game also does show up for "not my", that does not tell us anything.
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The query results have changed since. The game shows now with "ne" or more, as a search term. It will also show up for "thats".
That the search will match 60 results to "ne" is curious. While this is not a good term to search with, one would expect to match a lot more than 60 titles. But those everyday short words are not good titles. Like fps for example. Those are better used as tags, not as title fragments. You do not search with "fps" to find "banana fps".
In my opinion it depends all on what the search is supposed to do and to make it understood to the people using that feature - without need to consult a message board. I have different expectations from a box called "Title Search" in contrast to "Tag Search", "Keyword Search" or just "Search". Or expectations about a box that does not even tell it is a free write in box and disguises as a drop down list.