I expect the search tool to provide an accurate and relevant list of results for the searched term.
Actual Behavior
The search promotes games with less visits, less players, lower like ratios, more recent created times, even games which have stolen our icon above our game.
Issue Area: Roblox Website Page URL:Discover - Roblox Impact: High Frequency: Constantly Date First Experienced: 2022-10-01 00:10:00 (+01:00) Date Last Experienced: 2022-11-19 00:11:00 (+00:00)
The problem is that search should under no circumstance be prioritising that place if it were functioning correctly.
That is also not the entirety of the body of my request, This was showing how bad the issue is for us. The fact we don’t appear under ‘obby’ or ‘easy obby’ is extremely damaging for our engamgent.
The game went public 1 month ago and has 500-1.5k concurrent users but still doesn’t show up in any searches for ‘ragdoll clicker’. It will ONLY show up in search if you add a bracket somewhere in the search. For example ‘[ ragdoll clicker’ will make our game the first result. I assume this is because when we first launched the game we had subtitles such as ‘[NEW]’ or ‘[EVENT]’ in the title, now our game cannot be found without adding a bracket.
I’ve removed the bracket subtitles from our game 3 days ago and we still do not show up in a search for ‘ragdoll clicker’.
Hi @LuaBearyGood, the search team at Roblox is constantly working on improving the accuracy and quality of our search results. It looks like your experience is appearing in the first position for “ultimate easy obby”, the second position for “easy obby”, and on the first page of results for “obby” (this is a tough search term to compete in!)
@Superslammin it looks like the issues with your experience are fixed as well, it is appearing first for the query “ragdoll clicker”.
Thanks for these reports, it’s good to see that the changes we have been making to search over the past months have fixed these issues for you both! Please reply if you are experiencing any additional problems.
While we are now appearing on search and we are grateful for that, a few weeks ago the search algorithm changed to one that doesn’t make much sense.
You mention the obby search term is tough to compete in, however we are top of our genre in terms of most core metrics, however we’re being placed below games with stats far worse than ours (according to data collected by rolimons).
From my research, the current search algorithm is almost entirely based on CTR, which while I could be seen as making sense (as users click on the game they searched for), in the case of genre searches such as ‘Obby’ and ‘Tycoon’ this is a very poor way of displaying results.
This is for two reasons:
Firstly, It incentives scam games who attempt to mislead the player into joining, at the time of writing I’ve attached an example of one of these games appearing above one of our other obbies, despite the fact Chill Obby enjoys ~95th percentile engagement and >60th percentile retention.
Secondly, it incentives rapidly changing Icons (Normally 10+ times a day). We can see here two of the top 5 games that appear under the search for ‘Obby’ (Escape Easy Admin Obby and Super Fun Obby) have gained this position simply by tricking users into thinking they have not played the game before, which further contributes to worse engagement.
In both these instances, the search algorithm is being incredibly inefficient in driving long term engagement for Roblox in addition to incentivising TOS breaking in order to gain more engagement, this makes it harder for legitimate developers to compete and provides less of an incentive to improve the core metrics that actually drives growth.
I think it would be beneficial to return to the old search algorithm (at least for genre searching) as that promoted games with good metrics. However I of course see the logic behind basing search off CTR for most other searches.
Hello @sk9lar, I was wondering if you might be able to look into this issue for my game. It used to be one of the first 10 games for the search term “army” (with no quotations) but in 2022 it suddenly got removed from that search term. Getting removed from this search query entirely massively reduced my game’s traffic. I’ve been operating under the assumption that this is a bug since then, because multiple games with no players show up if you scroll down, but my game does not. My game also does not show up if you search the game’s exact name in quotations. Is this a bug? Does my game have a filtered or blacklisted word in the name or description? Could the translated names and descriptions be affecting English search queries? My community has been insisting we are “blacklisted” on searches, but my game does show up if you search other terms, including the full game name without quotation marks. As you can imagine, the simple term “army” is the most popular search term out of any in my game’s name or description, and being removed from that query’s result dropped my player base by a very noticeable amount. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Ultimate Easy Obby - Roblox
