Post by Citizenkane in Why does search only load 60 results? Is there a way to see more?

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Thank you for that advice. I've tried searching tags, and I am aware that I can enter my own tags into the box, rather than use the ones that are suggested. Sadly though, as you seemed to be infer, there's a lot that hasn't been tagged. I'm really disappointed in itch.io here.

Take this for instance: https://logen-nein.itch.io/tenement-living-blues

This product doesn't appear if you search "CY_BORG tenement" or "CY_BORG generator". It's not tagged at all, and is simply in the Games > Roleplaying > Free category. The only way I found it was from a random blog post on another site. It's great content, and the type of thing I'm looking for, but Itch leaves me no way to find anything else like it, other than trawling sites and social media other than Itch. That feels ...bad.

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redonihunter1 year ago(+2)

As I said, search is random. And truncated. It might not be random for each search attempt though. I guess they rebuild their tables regularly on a semi random algorithm that tries to give projects their share for the search terms. Something like that was hinted or even explained in some threads. This it not the first thread wondering why stuff does not show up in search ;-)

Also, I did see the game mentionend, in the search https://itch.io/search?q=Cy_Borg+generator , but not in the others.

The dev did misfile the game though. It is in games and not in physical games.

And on top of that, there is a bug in tagging. Underscores do not work.

The tag "cy_borg" translates to "cy-borg". You can only find stuff tagged as cy-borg when tag-searching for cy_borg.

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Citizenkane1 year ago

Interesting that you see the game mentioned in your search results. I sadly don't. So you're right, the results are randomized to an extent — certainly between users, though on my end the results never change, so I'm not sure if they ever will.

As for the tagging bug, that's very helpful information. Disappointing, really, but very helpful! I guess I'm just at the mercy of Itch here, or of other platforms to help me discover things I might be able to find here.

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redonihunter1 year ago

It was in the last row for me. Try searching only for tenement, there are only a handful of results.

The thing with such searches, not only here, but google as well, is this. Combining words is not always helpful, if the word is generic or comes up very often. And, as we learned, cy_borg is not written well for the algorithms.

There are only like 10 results for tenement. One might assume, that combining cyborg and tenement would give you only the overlap and even less results than 10, like 2 maybe. But those search algorithms do not work like that; it is not a database query. My guess would be, that it almost ignores tenement, like fractional rounding, in the presence of a relevant term like cyborg.

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redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

On another note, tags are the resonsibility of the publishers. This has drawbacks. Like devs not tagging their stuff at all. Or having different opinions what a tag stands for or if it applies. Or what qualities should or should not be tagged. There are people tagging indie on itch...

The freedom of tagging also means, that there are heaps more tags than on Steam, where there are only pre-defined tags. And I think they are at least in part chosen by the users.

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