Theoretically if my 2-word title doesn't appear, than no titles should appear with 3 or more words, but there actually quite a lot of them.
- (SUPER MEGA METROPOLITAN KARATE KICKING SLIME KILLING X-TERMINATOR 40,000) (1/9)
- The True Slime King Soundtrack (1/5)
- Animated Pixel Slime (1/3)
Slime Research(1/2)
If results are discarded behind the scenes, then I think pagination with a configurable Results per Page and no total limit would be better. It'd also be helpful to have main page sorting settings of Popular, New & Popular, Top sellers, Top rated, Most Recent and re-use them for searches.
Relevance by percentage of title also seems like a bad heuristic since it makes me consider changing my game's name to "Slime" on itch.io, but I don't have any alternatives.
As an experiment I tried a custom google search engine pointed at itch.io and a search for "slime" gave me my game on page 3 and 4. Maybe that would be another option, but I don't know anything about licensing or costs or phone-home/user-tracking side-effects if google stuff is baked into a site. (Edit: itch seems to load google analytics by default, so that's probably not an issue then)
As far as searching by tag itself, I only found a slime tag link through the custom search engine and then found Slime Research. As an itch.io user attempting to search by tag, even after being told it exists, I have no clue where to find such a feature through itch.io itself. Something like this, along with the game-edit tag search where it shows you added tags, might be good.
Thanks for the response! Hope you find something useful in here.
Edit: As for the tag page you mentioned below, the drop-down list interface is pretty bad. Like I said above, copying the tag-editing system we use while editing a game and allowing users to search with that would be MUCH better.