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Why does search only load 60 results? Is there a way to see more?

A topic by Citizenkane created Oct 12, 2023 Views: 312 Replies: 7

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Additional results never load for me in search, beyond the initial 60. I have tried in both Chrome and Firefox, on mobile and desktop, and all my searches cap at 60 results. Perhaps itch.io isn't meant to be a discoverability platform, but for creators with no established following, this feels like a gross waste of potential. If loading/displaying more than 60 search results is a performance issue, can we at least not get pagination?

I am trying to discover new content for a TTRPG I've been playing, CY_BORG, and this is what various search results look like:
https://itch.io/search?q=cy_borg
https://itch.io/games/tag-cy_borg
https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-cy_borg
https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-cy_borg
https://itch.io/misc/tag-cy_borg

Clearly there's some overlap between the normal search and the various tag searches, but there's content that never gets discovered unless its searched for directly, or if users search individual tags. The problem gets evern more obvious when you look at some of the CY_BORG jams, which I found linked on the official discord for the game. Theres a ton of content here which doesn't appear in any of the above links:

https://itch.io/jam/404-jam-not-found/entries
https://itch.io/jam/urbn-lgndexe/entries
https://itch.io/jam/trigger-warning-trigger-happy-jam/entries

Surely this isn't by design, and is just a bug? Otherwise why would we have the auto-loading setting?

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Citizenkane208 days ago

Is this setting just broken?

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redonihunter208 days ago

Search is random and truncated and not browse. You get pages/infinity scroll on browsing for tags and for popular etc.

Try other search terms. There are ones with far over 100 results. But you still will not get an exhaustive result displaying all items. This is intentional, so all relevant results get a piece of the cake at some point. The reasons might be, to discourage search ranking optimisation, as people try to do with regular search engines.

Also, this might be counterintuitive, but you cannot search for tags. If you want to find things with tags, you need to use the other "search box", the tag box. You can enter any tag there, it does not has to be in the list. But someone has to have tagged it.

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Citizenkane208 days ago (1 edit)

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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redonihunter207 days 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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Citizenkane207 days 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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redonihunter207 days 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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redonihunter207 days 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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