Group search should match whole query before matching individual terms

[Tor_Laws (Tor)]

As a developer and player finding the correct group sometimes without using Google may be a bit too hard and takes too long. Often when a friend or fellow developer asks me or someone else to join a group, you’d normally search up the group in the search bar, however this doesn’t always work. Sometimes it shows up other groups that often aren’t even related to your group due to interpretation of the search query.

For an example let’s say I hired someone to work for my group “Tor Studios” and they search it up to join it. Instead of showing my group, it displays other groups such as “Shyfoox studios”. In this search, what is searches for is “Tor” and “Studios” and then of course the biggest group with the word “Studios” appears on the top which is “Shyfoox studios”.

A solution to this is making it search for the whole group name first then the words separate after if there’s no results. This will mean when you search, it will show the most relevant group which is often what the developer or player wishes to see. It prevents people from having to use Google if they wish to find a specific group.

[Firebrand1 (Firebrand)]

Going to go ahead and bump this. I’ll often enter the exact name of the group I’m looking for and have to dig through 12+ pages before I find it.

This is particularly problematic for game studio owners who are looking to secure their studio’s name and similar names on Roblox, and need to search for those unowned legacy groups that had already sniped them.

[21stPsalm (Nanonauts)]

There’s been an issue with the roblox group search system for a long time, but no one has seem to say anything about it. Although many have been thinking about it, and have been annoyed about this issue. So the current issue with the group search system is that whenever you search for a specific group, 90% of the time it shows a completely different group related to nothing even close to what you searched for. For example I searched up “Era of Terror”, but the results showed groups like “Car crusher official group”, “Official Team Turtle”, or something completely non-related to what I searched up. Most people will say it’s because it has what you searched up in the group description, but yet that’s not the case considering there’s nothing in any of those groups that say “Era of Terror”. I’m getting tired of having to find groups I’m looking for, that shouldn’t be hard to find at all, quite frankly I’m getting tired of it and I know a bunch of others are as well. So here are a few other results that popped up whenever I was trying to find a specific group.

Attempting to search for specific groups

Stuff like that is what I’m talking about, as you can see in these screenshots that mostly every group that popped up as a result had nothing to do with the group I put in the search bar. It shouldn’t be that hard to make a good search filter, at the moment it’s so difficult to find a group that I’d like to join or look around in, why can’t it just be simple like it was a while back. Also one other issue is that if a new player to roblox goes to try and join a group, they search it up, but then there’s no results for their group or it’s 20 pages down, so either they can’t find the group or it’s unnecessarily far down the list of groups presented.

[Affenity (Visual)]

When viewing the requests Roblox sends, it appears they are using keyword-search, which is horrible when searching for exact group names. There is another API here that allows for name-search, which would produce more precise results:

https://groups.roblox.com/docs#!/GroupSearch/get_v1_groups_search_lookup
And using the API mentioned above, you get the following results:

https://groups.roblox.com/docs#!/GroupSearch/get_v1_groups_search
With the keyword-based search API, you get the following results

[Minstrix]

Ideally Roblox would simply change the search on the website to use the name-search API, rather than forcing people to access the API directly.

[BanTech]

Or even better, let us pick with a drop-down!

[Tor_Laws (Tor)]

It’s a simple explanation as mentioned in my original post. Rather than searching for the entire provided keyword(s) it splits them up into individual words and return the largest groups with these words in either group name or description. So in your case it searches up the biggest groups with “Era,” “of” and “Terror” in both group name and description. As you may notice the second group in the screenshot you provided is named “Monsters of Etheria”

[6Clu (clu)]

Improved Group Search Feature

On Roblox currently I feel that the group search feature could really be improved, at the current point in time their is around 6.3 million groups so I’m not expecting a miracle fixture but what I would like to see is if I look up a specific phrase I get more relevant results.

Here is an example of what happens when you search up “British Army” in the current search system:

With some of these, I can understand why I might be interested - United States Army or the Red Army for example - if I’m looking at ro-military. However what I don’t approve of is my top result was “Ashe Army” which isn’t even relevant to my actual search. Don’t get me wrong, some people will want to be involved with that but why would I want it as my top result?

Now to really iterate my point:

I looked up French Army, now this was disappointing:

I didn’t see my first group with anything to do with “French Army” until page 7. And for those who might complain that people most interested in these are likely to be French so they’ll have a French name…

A few suggestions which might be better:

• A tag system, so you can enter tags and then get results i.e. if you search up “British Army” the two tags would be “British” and “Army” because they are obviously key ideas.
• Some at least pre-listed ones categorized ones to at least show up.

I use to remember back in 2015 when you searched up a group and it actually gave you a list of key term relevant groups.

[PCHDB]

I don’t know if this is just me, however whenever I search for a group on roblox, it doesnt show the one ive searched for. Say, I search ‘Iceberg Hotels’, its the 4th one down.

So say my group instead (only 86 members) - called Blocky Studioz. It doesn’t show up until the second page at the bottom.

This is really annoying as when I tell people my group name, its basically impossible as its not the first one that comes up, despite them searching it exactly. I really want this issue to be fixed, as when im trying to search for a group, loads come up before the one I actually searched for - even though i spell everything correctly and exactly. I think many others find this annoying too, and I would love to see it be fixed.

Many thanks,
PCHDB

[Webspace]

The following image largely speaks for itself. For several years ROBLOX have either failed to notice or have ignored their group search’s inability to properly order search results.

Presently it appears that ROBLOX’s search will take each keyword and fire off results based on those as opposed to actually searching for what you want. Even then they fail at that task. The “Man Of The Year” bot group only appears because the word “finally” appears in the description. The current API can be seen below.

https://groups.roblox.com/docs#!/GroupSearch/get_v1_groups_search

This has been incredibly annoying for users trying to find not just their own groups but other user’s groups. This feature has long needed an overhaul.

At present, the only way to find the exact match of what you are searching for, that I am aware of, is to use:

https://groups.roblox.com/docs#!/GroupSearch/get_v1_groups_search_lookup

However this is not a particularly user friendly solution.

[FxllenCode (fallen)]

Hello! My name is FxllenCode, and I have some ideas on how to improve the roblox search system.

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to gain traction on smaller games that have lot’s of competition. Recently, roblox has pushed an update to the search system, and frankly, it was very underwhelming. I was very excited that finally, I can start getting organic visits. But that’s not that happened. Multiple developers have reported issues with this update. The original post about this is here.

I have also had a serious problem with this update, my game, C h a i n $ Aesthetic Homestore, does not appear under the terms, Homestore, Aesthetic Homestore, or even the direct name, C h a i n $ Aesthetic Homestore.

This is outrageous, as it prevents my game from getting any organic visits. Games that don’t even have the word Aesthetic in it will show up instead of ours.

My suggestion is to create a “Featured” bar for common queries, such as obby, tycoon, team, multiplayer, piggy, murder, homestore, etc. This is would fit next to the recommended game, which was added in the latest roblox update. You would have to fill out an application to get featured here, and the requirements would not have to do with player count, like many current featured spots do.

This is help increase growth for smaller games who are shut-out by spammy games that will show up on unrelated queries.

Here is the game and group

c h a i n $ - Roblox

Chain$ Aesthetic Homestore - Roblox

Thank you so much, and if you would like more info, please message me here, I would be happy to help!

FxllenCode

[superguy611 (Superr)]

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to filter groups by member count or by name, due to when you search up groups such as a “Cafe” group you get random groups that are in no order so you literally have to scroll through 100+ pages to sometimes find what your looking for. And sometimes when you even search up a name of a group the name doesn’t even come up that you searched for it just comes up with random results.

Screenshot of the groups not being in order and not being able to filter them at all

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to find groups that I am looking for easier.

[metatablecatmaid (metatablecat)]

This issue has propagated from the search itself, call me egotistical, but I’ll use my group as an example.

now if you search “Filtered Development Studios” directly, it will not appear as the first result. I am yet to find which page it decided to appear on (if any)

What’s weirder is, if you search only “Filtered”, the group does appear, if pushed down slightly on the first page…

And, before I made the fix to include my name in the description, it would not appear if you searched ‘FilteredDev’, the group owner.

On the topic of extreme meta-gaming, make it against the TOS. Everyone meta-games slightly, even I’m responsible for it in the FDS group by adding my name to the description, but not to the extent that these groups have pushed.

[BitwiseAndrea (Bitwise)]

Exact matches are now prioritized in group search

We are looking into more ways to improve group search and discovery