Deleted 352 days ago
Let me say it again: search is truncated and random. But not random per search. More like per day or whatever. I assume the servers build a nightly search index, so it does not take a minute for each search.
You will show up on one day and not on the other. It is supposed to cycle the relevant items. Your dog or was it cats even was on place one of search. But itch will not tell how it works, because people will try to game the system.
I remember a thread where the dev complained that the game was not showing up in search despite searching for the exact title.
That it is truncated and random, as in, not the same every day and you do not know how it is ranked?
I do not know if staff or faq said it somewhere. I seem to remember the mod explaining it some time ago in response to a complaint that an indexed item could not be found by exact title search, but I do not find the thread among all the threads about games not indexed. Maybe I misremember the details. That staff will not tell how those things work exactly you can read several times.
But you can observe and test this for yourself. The capping of results is obvious. And if you look now and in a few days and will have a different ordering and different items you have proof that the results change. What you do not know, is the mechanism of the change. Is it pure rng. A cycling of a pool of available items. A combination of those and other factors, inlcuding popular ranking?
We do know that the search was recently overhauled and will be again. There is an announcement by leafo in developer updates subforum about this.
What I still do not really get, if the search is just optimized for title search or if it can only search/find title matches. I would expect it to not be a pure title search, but maybe it is. It certainly does not help that there are so many games on itch that for practically every word you will have games with that word in the title.
Tetris. There are at least 123 games named exactly Tetris. What I do not know, if there are more games named Tetris, that did not appear in the search for tetris. It yields 180 items. There are 1600 games tagged tetris, but only 71 of them are named exactly Tetris.
I do know that searches will not give all results of titles containing the word(s). I found two examples created by pop shop.
Maybe it is different for single word searches matching single word titles. Those examples had multiple words and the search was for a subset of the words.
I have not been able to find any instances of an itch.io staff member directly stating that search results are truncated (the only person I found who suggests this is you, oddly enough). What I did find was multiple instances of the staff clarifying that search results are optimized for searching for exact titles.
"The box is optimized for exact title searches, that's what. Searching by keywords is a matter of luck." (No Time To Play, Why is the search function of the store so limited?)
I've said this in other posts, but essentially search is suited for finding things by direct title, not by topic. Tags are how people browse things by topic. People do not browse by topic...through our search engine. Hope that helps. (leafo, My game doesn't show up in search or tags)
"Our search engine is optimized for Direct title search since that is how the majority of people use search. For users who are browsing for new games, we try to push them into our browse pages with tags, which are surfaced on the top of the search results. This means that the text in the body of your project page and any tags you add will not become search queries for your project. Tags are only for our browsing pages, which are separate from search." (Limitations of Search, Getting indexed on Search & Browse)
So no searching of description. Maybe tag searching will be added, if I understand leafos announcment correctly. The wording is vague.
But if search results are not capped, why could we both not find your monsters asset pack? I tried several of your packs, most I can find with the search button.
I will also not find the pack Slimes | Pixel Asset Pack by searching for slimes. I did get a result of 72 items. It can be assumed that there are at least 73 items with that word in their title. This is capping/truncating.
And the results for that monster thing was capped at a lower number. It is still capped at 61 if you activate adult items.
The capping for tetris is 181. Of the 1600 games tagged tetris, most have tetris in their name. So I searched some of those games with tetris in their name along other words in the search 180 search results. Many do not appear there. And only 123 games are named exactly tetris in the search result, so there should be 60 games with tetris plus other words. Only 60.
Those 60 are what I assume to be a subset of matches that will rotate in some manner to expose every game once in a while to such a search. I am not confident, if it will always return all exact title matches, but I am confident, that it will not return all matches where multiple words are involved.