Roblox Game Search

[SteadyOn]

tl;dr:
Roblox search is broken, doesn’t show the games that you are searching for, instead shows badly rated, low player count and favourite botted games.

Hey, I’ve emailed roblox support about this and put it on twitter quite a few times. There are also some people like @ConfidentCoding and @Ultraw who have addressed this on their twitter accounts.

The core of this issue is essentially favourite botted games. People pay to have their game botted with favourites, and then they show up at the top of the games search. Rarely do I search something and find what I’m looking for, and most of these places are place teleporters anyway (i.e. they teleport you to a central cart game that the person has “made”).

My game, Bakery Tycoon , which is admittedly just a button tycoon (although scripted and built entirely by me without a tycoon kit), has three million visits, and 55k favourites. It also has collectively over 2 million views from various youtuber’s videos. However, when these

Youtubers

MAKING MY OWN ROBLOX BAKERY - YouTube
ROBLOX BAKERY TYCOON - YouTube
- YouTube
(There are more but not enough time to find them all)

play my game, they quite often don’t leave a link. This leaves users having to find it themselves. This is where the issues start. Searching “Bakery Tycoon” in game search gives you this:

Although I searched almost the exact name of the game, it doesn’t show up, instead all of these 0 player games do. Although currently I do average around 50 players during the week time, this was happening when I was on 1.2k concurrent for a month.

Now, you may be thinking that this is simply a result of the fact that this is a tycoon, and people make a lot of tycoon games, it’s something you can do very simply with a tycoon kit and minimal scripting knowledge. But, it’s not.

Here, for example, I searched for Jailbreak; say for example I was new to Roblox, and saw a video of someone playing it on youtube. If I searched for it, I get this:

This is very likely to drive a lot of people away from the platform. If you see a game you want to play, and then cant find it by using the actual roblox search, you’re definitely less likely to sign up.

Some more game searches

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I know some youtubers do link! And thankyou for that!

[Noble_Draconian]

I’ve been having this issue for a while. If I search my game “RS Minigames”, it doesn’t show up at all in the search results.

[RickyTheFishy]

I don’t think it picks games that have been botted or has low player visits, it just doesn’t work at all. Searching my specific game titles gives me completely irrelevant games. Meanwhile mines is shown at least 20 down. The search feature definitely needs to be fixed.

[SteadyOn]

I think they might’ve removed the favourite botted thing recently in an attempt to try and fix the search, before a few days ago though, it was all like 100k+ favourited games with like 1 concurrent player

[SmoothBlockModel (Smooth)]

Not that this is relevant to the problem at hand, but try submitting your game link as a Comment - typically people will upvote it if they’re interested in finding the game as well (it’s just as frustrating for players when youtubers “forget” to leave links!)

[RickyTheFishy]

Interesting enough, on today’s TNL stream Terri even mentioned that you have to google search for the Roblox Live Hangout place. If you try to search it in the search results it won’t even come up. I think this shows how big of a problem this is.

[WhoseTrade]

the search engine is just bad

[Iron_Legion]

Posting the same thing I posted in this thread

The search algorithm was updated in December. All of the games reported in this thread are now showing up correctly in the search results for me. Do you have any more examples of popular games that don’t show up correctly in the search results?

[TTVDarthAnonymous1]

My game has a lot of place visits (33.5k) and used to show up when searching noob defense. That is no longer the case anymore. What gives?
https://www.roblox.com/games/1787615069/Noob-Defense-Winter-Update

[icunicu1983]

I have a game called Number Blasters.
When I search Number Blasters, it is the 36 result (not including sponsored games).
This keeps if off the front page of the search for the exact match so you have to scroll to find it.
NONE OF THE GAMES ABOVE MINE ARE CALLED NUMBER BLASTERS!

Most of the games above mine have lower visits/favorites and lower like ratios.

This is like sabotage if it is hard for me to find my own game.

For the record, I tried searching with the Fireball icons in the title and it didn’t even come up.
I also tried removing them from the title and searching Number Blasters the next day and it was still 26 spots down.