Please note that this was a reply that I wrote to leafo in another thread. But it is of vital import we get an answer and to see if anyone else can help us with this search issue. My objective is not to tick anyone off, it is to have an open discussion that will benefit everyone. 

leafo, 

We are having the same problem in the site search. What ever we have done to tick you guys off we are sorry. I am serious when I say, WE ARE SORRY. Can we PLEASE be put back into the search results? Please. Our game Wizards of Alamar and a free version has been uploaded a couple weeks and all was going fine... then i asked someone in support how we could get on the front page. Look, you need to understand that if there is something we don't understand, we will ask the staff questions. We aren't afraid of hearing 'NO' as an answer, we just want to know the answer. I bring this up because after I submitted a support email asking how to get our game promoted on this site... no one can find us. Go onto the back end of your website and look at our views... steady trend upwards each day... Then the email was sent and a steady trend downwards. Now i want you to look at our activity on the site... it has been a steady trend upwards. Were doing what your staff said to do and the result... is that we apparently pissed someone off and NO ONE can even search for us unless they know our EXACT GAME NAME. We took all the screen shots if your interested.  

For example:

- If I type in “Wizard” 62 games show up except ours, which happens to be Wizards of Alamar. 

-If I search through all the games on sale, which we are running ours for 75% off… nothing. 

-If I search role playing which is what the game is under… nothing. 

So here I am saying, you win. I am sorry and will never ask a question again after this mail. But could we please get our game listed again? If not could you please have the courtesy to tell me that our game is not wanted on your site, because i don't want to waste your time or mine. And I am sorry if this post upsets anyone, but it upsets me to no end when something we have work on for such a long time, and have poured so much into is just tossed to the side without any reason why.

 The X and Z Team

i did attach the screen shots of search for wizards  and wizards of alamar. we have 30 or 40 more screen shots of various searches if you want to see those also.

I was wondering why more people weren't playing this game!

I'm interested in the answer. But thanks brent!

Pending a more informed answer, I doubt there's a problem with search. Searching for "Alamar" returns both editions of your game, which means they're listed. On the other hand, searching for highly generic terms like "wizards" or " role playing" is likely to return your game buried under many other results. Doubly so as free-form searches cut off altogether after a few dozen results, as you've noticed. Try looking under the role-playing genre instead, but be prepared to browse through lots and lots of results. We do have over 150K games on Itch.io by now, and a lot of them must be RPGs and/or about wizards.

Itch.io as designed tries to give as many games as possible a chance, but with so many of them uploaded, the software can only do so much. You simply have to advertise in other venues as much as you can, in addition to here.

I'd like to add something as a fellow creator. I happen to be working on a game of my own, that just entered the production stage. Can you guess what it is?

...A generic fantasy RPG that has the word "wizard" right there in the title.

And yes, this is pure coincidence. But do you understand how terribly generic our respective games are? That mine is a text-based Twine while yours is a colorful platformer isn't going to register in a search by theme or genre. Said search doesn't need to be broken, or biased, to bury the both of us under an avalanche of countless other games that are all more or less the same thing.