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Itch Search Results not returning obvious matches

A topic by Moga created Sep 13, 2019 Views: 329 Replies: 3
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This seems to be persistent in my experience so I am writing about this for the second time.

A game I have created does not show up when searching the most obvious TAGs / RATING / NAME.

Example : If the game's name is "Pond Fishing VR" and is tagged VR and fishing and whatever.. it should be a result from the search words "VR FIshing" or "Pond Fishing," but it is not.

The game is also rated and should appear alongside other games in the rated list but does not.  NOTE: The search results are sometimes very short, maybe 30-45 games, making no room for the argument that they are way down on a huge list.. no... I think they are not on the list because the search query algorithm is broken... maybe.. or not very well refined yet.....

So the game gets effectively very little exposure from all angles of search query. This is poor.

No fishing enthusiast will find the game and no VR player will find the game unless they type "Pond Fishing VR" explicitly. 

Its so bad in fact that I could search for "Pond Fisherman VR" and it still would not turn up "Pond Fishing VR". This is of course not the name of my game but it illustrates the same issue.

Any thoughts or people who have experienced the same thing? WooT ! Thanks

Moderator moved this topic to Questions & Support
Moderator

Let's take them one by one. I tried searching for "Dogfight VR" and your game Orbital Dogfight VR was the third result. Search works. And results are short because they cut off after a while. They don't include all possible results. Besides, the short descriptions of your games just repeat most words from the title, against explicit prompts on the game editing form, and you don't have VR as a tag.

Please use the best practices for metadata, and if in doubt go through the search indexing checklist. Hope this helps!

So weird it does not show up on my end.... I apologize about the naming and metadata.. its completely redundant but I was trying to see what worked and what didn't  after not being able to see the game in results. I thought if I spammed one of the keywords its would give me better results.... Could it be something with my cache or cookies? I just can't see my damn game in the results =....(  


I'll go back to best practices with the description and so forth but I'm telling your something is up....

gAH! Now its working... wheres the confused emoji

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