Imagine you visit itch.io for the first time because you heard there are a lot of cool games on there.

How it currently is:

1. You type in "strategy" in the top search bar and hit Enter.
2. You scroll through the 60 results to the bottom of the page.
3.  "Hmm, there really aren't that much strategy games on itch.io." You close the website.

How it should be:

1. You type in "strategy" in the top search bar and hit Enter.
2.  You can continue scrolling and more results will load in until you find an awesome game. (there are 40000 games tagged with 'strategy')

After asking in the forums I now know that the top search bar on itch.io is only for the first 60 exact game name matches. Now this might make sense from an implementation point of view, since exact name matches probably require a special algorithm. But how should users know this and why should they care? They want to scroll and discover more games.

An easy way to improve this would be to load the 60 magic results first. Once the user has scrolled to the bottom continue loading in generic search results. Maybe the same ones a user would see when searching for a tag in the "Browse" page.

Or maybe at least show a button at the bottom that links to the "Browse" page so users can continue their journey. Something like: "Didn't find what you're looking for? Try browsing for the Tag(link)"

I literally wrote  "search results will typically have all of the full title matches and fill up with about 60 partial matches"

I might have used other wording for the fill up, it is just an observation that you will often have around 60 matches.  I guess those are the searches where there are few exact title matches and many partial ones. Try searching for tetris. Or try searching for something unpopular like chronometer and count the results.

But search is being overhauled right now. But if you really do search strategy, it will show you the tag strategy, where all games are to be found that have tagged strategy and are indexed.

Even better, if you're looking for a specific genre, use a tag. That's what they're for.

Yeah, tags work great! 

I guess what I'm trying to say is it would be cool if you could do a search where you get more results. Maybe the full title matches first and then the results continue on with more partial matches followed by description matches followed by tag matches or whatever. So have it behave more like a google search and less like an exact keyword match search limited to X results. For me it would be cool to have more results to browse even if they don't match perfectly. Just a suggestion :)

Glad to hear that search is being overhauled. Excited to see what the devs come up with :)

You can use "site:itch.io keyword" on most search engines ;-)

The search box is just not a keyword search box and it seems that many people do not understand this at first. Also, it is not clear at first sight, that you can write in the tag box and are not limited to the suggested tags there.

For those suggested tags, the search box does give those tags as results, just not the titles that have those tags directly. You have to click the "strategy" tag shown to you, after searching for strategy.