Hey folks,
I know this question has been asked before but I couldn't find any solution for this.
My game is called 'Worldwide Sports Fishing' but I can't find it on Itch.io's search with the word fishing, wich seems to be the most important search tag.
The word 'fishing' is in the title, in the description and in the tags.
It's a finished project with downloadable files, but still no success to find it.
Any ideas?
Yes the minimum price was adjusted today.
But still it makes no sense that the game could be found with the word 'sports' but not with the word 'fishing'.
In another posting -below- I've said that this happens with every search tag (i.e. horror or tank).
So it can't be caused by the price adjustment, but it's a general problem.
Anyway the search routine should find every game on Itch.io and not just some few that itch.io thinks are the top games.
This is really absurd if itch.io limits the search like this.
How can any program code know what's the best for user A or for user B ?
I really appreciate what Itch.io offers and I know that it's a lot of work.
But such strange algorithms destroy all the effort.
I'll contact support cause imho this is a very important disadvantage for the users, the devs and Itch.io itself!
Anyway thanks for your support!
So this is definetely a bug.
Please try it out. Go to the startpage https://itch.io and search for any tag or game.
It will display exactly a maximum of 60 games and ignores all the others.
Just if you continue and click the tag button it will find all games!
But that's not how a search in 2019 should be!
The support says everything is allright, but it's not!
So how to talk with a wall? ^^ It's realy annoying.
Hey,
Sorry for taking a bit to get back. The short answer is that our search needs a lot of work! We know there are shortcomings with how tagging, keywords, and title matches are balanced. Generally for topic searches like "fishing" we try to encourage people to use tags, and point people to the browse pages.
From what we've seen, the average user using search is trying to find something specific by name, so we optimize for that. The secondary use is trying to find something by topic, eg they want to find games about zombies, fishing, space, etc. In those scenarios we try to point them to our browse pages where there's much more control over how things are filtered and sorted. (for example, if you search fishing you'll see a link to the Fishing tag on the top)
In the long term we hope to update our search system and introduce some of the additional options that are available in browse as well.
There are a lot of games on itch.io, and it's a challenge making sure search returns what a user wants. I know every developer wants to have their game show up first when something related to their project is typed in, but there are too many games to give that to everyone. To handle this we try to give a more organized way for people to get their game indexed through our tags system. The best way to boost visibility on our platform's main site is by correctly tagging your project, filling out metadata, and doing things like posting devlogs.
Hope that helps.
Hey leafo,
yes of course every dev wants to see his game on first place :D but that was absolutely not my intention!
I know about the work for a website and how difficult it can be with databases cause I'm creating websites as well.
And that's the point!
Itch.io is such a good idea and so well done that it's a shame to have such a bad search.
It's like a skycrapper without a foundation ;)
quote leafo: The best way to boost visibility on our platform's main site is by correctly tagging your project, filling out metadata, and doing things like posting devlogs.
Yes, yes, yes, every dev is doing this, but it doesn't help at all if the search just finds 60 games.
Please understand that -as a dev- you can do whatever you want, find the most best tags, do the best news about the project, but the search still just finds 60 games...
