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redonihunter297 days ago

From my observation the search has two kinds of results. It does title matching. Then title matching by "relevance". Like boxing will also match box. But it does not match any game that has no "box" in the title.

Let's try fishing. That is also a tag. The new box will suggest fishing as a tag. Note, boxing was not suggested as a tag. It will suggest boring.

The search result will also display fishing as a tag and then all the games it deems currently relevant for fishing, and those are only titles with fish somewhere.

So why was the tag boxing not shown as a search result? Because it is not in the list of featured tags. Or suggested tags. Whatever you want to call them.


But from my testing, it's not only the title, it's also the short description/tagline


I believe that people think this, but can you give an example, where the title has not resemblance to a word, yet you can find it in search? Fishing and Boxing were both negative.

Spamming the title with seo terms is a problem. If I were to implement search algorithms, I would activly punish such titles's relevance, since they are obviously spreading out their relevance.

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LabChurros297 days ago(+1)
Like boxing will also match box. But it does not match any game that has no "box" in the title.

This is probably just search APIs auto-correcting and doing combined searches. This is a nice feature since boxing is also the gerund for the verb to box.


So why was the tag boxing not shown as a search result? Because it is not in the list of featured tags. Or suggested tags. Whatever you want to call them.

As I mentioned in my post from what I can test it's because tags used on a number below 200-300 games will not be autocompleted. "Boxing" has 165 games while "fishing" has 1,624 games. I am assuming that range as the cutting of point because the lowest tag to auto-complete I could figure out was "tennis" at 385 games.

I believe that people think this, but can you give an example, where the title has not resemblance to a word, yet you can find it in search? Fishing and Boxing were both negative.

Searching for "slugfest" will give you 4 games with slugfest on the title ahead of Toe II Toe and Super Slav Brothers. Those last two do not have the word "slugfest" in the title but do in the tagline and this ordering, title first, tagline later, seems to be by design.

I strongly believe that because my latest game is a stronger example of this. I am an NSFW dev and have been keeping all the info on this discussion SFW to avoid people giving me shit. But if you search for "giantess" (a common keyword for a kink) you will get first about 14 games that have the word in the title. Past that point, all the other games(about 24 more) do not feature the word in the title but do in the tagline. Btw, 3 games out of the 14 are doing the "Game title(Tag Tag Tag)" thing. Although one is not doing with the searched word but some other tags.

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redonihunter297 days ago
As I mentioned in my post from what I can test it's because tags used on a number below 200-300 games will not be autocompleted.

That has nothing to do with this. The list is arbitrary. It is neither the number of games having that tag, nor if the tag has a description. It is just a list that has tags in it and is managed by itch in whatever fashion they deem usefull.

There is of course a correlation. Popular tags tend to have a description and be on the list. The new autocompletion feature is built regularly with a digest of the popular games. I do not know how they include the tags in there, but I would assume it is the same mechanism that would give a tag as a search result.

You cannot search for any tags. To "find" the tag boxing, you have to type it in verbatim in the tag box.

Based on your finding with the short description, I assume the search might populate the results with titles that have relevance in the short description, if there are not enough other results. Or they would appear but are truncated due to not having title matches, and too little relevance. I would assume with fishing that there would be titles that have fishin in description, but not in title. But there are so many exact title matches and enough partial title matches, that description matches are drowned out.

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