Current implementation of searching for games on itch.io desktop is a small search bar that lists games that match your search...but it seems so unreliable (either game doesn't show up at all or shows up for a brief moment before being replaced with a different list of games) that I usually just end up searching for the game in another browser and pasting the link in the itch.io desktop

Since I don't think the wack search bar isn't getting fixed anytime soon I'd like a way to do the "search in another browser and paste the link" just in the app

and looks like this was an issue even back in 2019: https://itch.io/t/340952/no-search-results-page-in-app

For me this search bar is completely broken. It does not result in search result list, but a game page of one specific game.

example -> helper text says "Need inspiration? try searching for 'trouble'"

Searching for that phrase in the itch app results in a particular game page opened

Searching for that phrase in the browser results in 54 titles / results

It seems to only "search" the "suggested" list. Or whatever we wanna call it. The top list that get's autocompletion on the website search while you type.

Since the regular site search is disabled on the Itch app, I have to assume, this is intentional, and I can guess reasons, if that really is intentional.

Search is literal title search (and literal user name search, but the results are the games of those users). It might just be, that practically no one uses search to search for games that are not also on the suggested list. One just does not search an unknown and obscure game by it's title. One does "search" unknown games by tags. And the search bar does not search games by tags.

Or it is just broken for the app, and they removed it, because it only ever gets used by developers searching their own games.