My reply here explains what's going on: https://itch.io/post/553467
Do you expect people to be searching for "museum" to find your game? Search is currently focused on either matching the title directly or sending them to the respective tag page to browse games by that theme/topic/etc.
I can't speak for 5ro4, but yes I expect my game to show up if someone searches for "slime". I currently have 7 referrers from searching "Slime Research", and 2 from search by "slime" tag. I also have 5 referrers from google and 1 from another search site, search query obviously unknown.
0 referrals from itch searches for "slime", is bad for me since I think I have less players than I could otherwise, and I think many people searching for "slime" would be interested in my unique gameplay, but they can't find it that way which is bad for them.
Sorry about that, I phrased the question ambiguously, I was trying to ask if someone who was looking for their game specifically would search museum. I'm trying to understand whether they have a userbase who knows their game by that name, or they're trying to show up in the list for the topic "museum."
Yes, I would expect people searching for "museum" to find my game. Also, as a user, I expect to find games with the word "museum" in the title when I search for it, followed by games which include it in the description, certainly before games that neither are museums nor contain that word anywhere. I also assumed that if there's no pagination it's because there are no more results, not because they are limited to a single page.
Anyway, I don't know if you made some changes already, but my game is showing now.
Thanks for the reply!
Thanks for the response. Sorry, I phrased my question ambiguously. I wanted to ask, is someone who is specifically looking for your game going to go to the itch.io search bar and type in museum?
The reason I'm asking is to differentiate between the intent of the person searching. For topic based searches, you're essentially competing for the slot with other games that share that topic. In those cases, I think pushing people towards browsing by tag is a better idea since those browse pages are more flexible. The goal of search is to show you what you're looking for: either a specific game (direct title match), or a list of games around a topic (topic match).
Someone who is looking specifically for my game would probably type the whole name, if they can remember it, but I believe someone who is looking for museum games should also be able to find it by just typing "museum".
I know when I'm looking for a specific game on itch.io (or any other platform), unless the name is short and easy, I'm unlikely to type it all.
