In My Movie, we offer access to Roblox’s image search. As a result of this, we have heard from players that the search has degraded over time and it is hurting our ability to grow, as it is seeming more and more likely that we will have to add more complexity to provide correct search results when they used to work more consistently.
Here are several obviously incorrect searches:
Horse is overwhelmingly Headless Horseman.
*Strawberry used to be overwhelmingly Strawberry Shortcake, but now it’s whatever this is.
Elephant does provide elephants, but mostly provides random images with the word elephant (which semantic search is supposed to help prevent).
Pizza provides exactly one image of pizza in the first 17 results.
Happy provides the Super Super Happy Face, and nothing else for several pages. While I would definitely agree this is a “happy” result, if you don’t want this, you won’t find something better.
Plane gives two planes, instead opting to assume you want planets.
Can gives zero cans, instead trying to expand it to various words.
Pan does the same thing. Zero pans.
Apple gives very few apples in the top results.
It’s not that these don’t have better results–you find them if you make your search query extremely complicated, or scroll down several pages. It’s that Roblox is providing worse results at higher rates.
Several requests do return good results. Through my experiments I found things like “doge” and “cheeseburger” tend to work well–but once it can be mistaken for another thing, it becomes useless. I would say 40% of the random nouns I typed in hit this.