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Search results for my game is poor. It's overtaken by fan games.

A topic by Basically Games created Feb 21, 2024 Views: 731 Replies: 9

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I've noticed an issue when trying to use Itch.io's search to find my game Baldi's Basics Plus. If you search for "Baldi's Basics Plus" then it shows up as the first result, so that's good, but when you drop the apostrophe and search "Baldis Basics Plus" suddenly it drops to about the 40th result, with a bunch of fan games and mods showing up first. Similarly searching for just "Baldi's Basics" will bring up Baldi's Basics Classic immediately, but Baldi's Basics Classic Remastered and Plus are buried under countless fan games and mods again, despite being official and my account being verified as such.

I'm not sure why the search behaves this way, but I definitely feel like there should be some fine tuning to prioritize official results somehow. Unless there's something I can do on my end to improve searchability, but I haven't been able to find anything I'm not already doing.

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leafoPinned ReplyAdmin308 days ago (2 edits) (+3)

I’ve gone ahead and added some search aliases to Baldi’s Basics Plus to make it match for those alternate titles. The reason why Baldi’s Basics Classic was matching for a lot of cases was because someone on our team added aliases a long time back.

I definitely understand the frustration you’re specifically experiencing, a lot of fan games use similar spellings and can flood the search results with incorrect pages. That was part of the goal of us introducing the autocomplete functionality, to allow the prominent result show up first so that users aren’t confused over misleading matches.

Some of the decisions we made for autocomplete results will likely be reflected in the primary search page at some point, to try to reduce noise from fan projects.

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Basically Games308 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks for doing that! I can't help but wonder though if it would be a good idea to allow devs to add search aliases themselves to improve searchability in a scenario like this. Granted, I know having a bunch of fan games competing with the real game is a relatively uncommon situation, but I think it would make sense to offer devs that option. If there are worries about it being abused, maybe it could be exclusive to verified accounts or something? I'm just spitballing here, but I feel like it would be a better option than having to reach out to support to have them added.

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leafoAdmin308 days ago

I have considered making it more generally available but it would definitely get abused, so we’d need to build a system for games to submit suggested aliases and then a moderator would have to approve them. Since we have so many games uploaded daily I don’t think we’d have the staff to process all those requests. I do like the idea of having verified accounts having more permissions as a way to limit the volume of requests.

For now, though, stuff like will be handled manually.

Thanks

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redonihunter308 days ago

I believe many people would not even consider it to be an alias, but just a spelling thing in combination with how the internet works. If you do not include stuff like ' in mapping, like you do with Capital letters, but need aliases, maybe just create automatic aliases for common spelling oddities like that almost whitespace character.

Or asked differently, how many people enter ' correctly in a search box? Propably as many or little as would search for Baldur's Gate, instead of baldurs gate, to cite another popular game with that problem.

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leafoAdmin307 days ago(+1)

There’s actually a few independent shortcomings happening. The alias solution is less about the punctuation and more about boosting the percentage of the title (or alias) that the search query matches so that it appears as a result with higher relevance

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redonihunter307 days ago

I think I can confirm that. Coincidentally there is a handy other game on top of popular right now with a ' in the title that might not have an alias yet, since it is only 10 days old.

If I begin typing, the new search feature will display it. Title is "PLANKTON'S PLAN - SpongeBob game"

This is what happened as I typed:

p l a n

game appeared as suggestion with the n

k t o n s

game dissapeared from suggestion with the s

" " p l a n

game appeared again. I do not think it matches the first word again, since it will not appear when typing otherword plan.

Then I mistyped, but the game stayed in suggestion and when doing the actual search it appeared in the middle of the results. But seeing the search string, this is because it is firstword+plan+secondword and the game will appear because of "plan". It will appear for literal search of firstword+plan+secondword

For that matter, the op game will appear in suggestion and search for "classic" alone.

This special case of spelling error is hard to diagnose, since that very grammar implies that the title will always be two or more words and the game will match for the second word, so the user and developer will not notice that it did not match the first word.

Of course I do not know how regular search engines handle this, but since they will find "Baldur's Gate" with "baldurs gate" without the spelling suggeston message, I assume they just match it similar to how they match cApItAliSaTiOn.

From some other trys, it seems search puts relevance on the word if it matches part of the word. So planktons as a single word will also find plankton's. Or arbys will match arby's and arbiter.

Anywas, tl;dr, if you want to avoid abuse of giving developers the ability to put forth aliases, just do some automatic matching of search terms or generate those type of aliases automatically, if it can only be done with aliases. Maybe only do that for games that would qualify for the new search feature. To my understanding it is not aliases. bg3 is an alias, and yes, Steam will show Baldur's Gate 3 for bg3, I guess they created an alias for that game.

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SimplyJam Games300 days ago

It works but if you forget the s this happens.

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hechelion309 days ago(+1)

It has been commented in several posts, the search engine prioritizes the name.

When you search for "Baldis Basics Plus" mods that say "baldis" instead of "baldi's" will be more relevant.

Regarding your suggestion, I don't work at Itch, but with the current structure, programming what you propose, I don't see it as something simple and I really don't know how many games are affected, if I'm honest it's the first time I've read something like yours case.

It would be best if you wrote only the suggestion in.

https://itch.io/board/580406/ideas-feedback

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redonihunter308 days ago(+1)

There currently obviously is no search term adaption taking spelling into acccount. Like general purpose search engines do. You need to enclouse it in " to only find sites with the wrong spelled name "baldis basics plus". If you search baldis basics plus it will not even ask if you misspelled the name and just search for baldi's basics plus, unlike balds basics plus, where it will search for the correct one too, but remind you that there might be a spelling error.

While there might not be a fuzzy approach be needed, ignoring the peculierites of some letters and concatenations should be mapped for the database searching. The url name of the game had to excluce the ', did it not?

I wonder how it is for names containing letters like these: â é Ø and so on. Or whitespace. I know there is even a bug with _ appearing in names, or at least tags. It maps to -, even though it is an allowed character.

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