Some games out there are not appearing in Search or Game-Sort pages. For example, this game was brought to me on Twitter and cannot be found in search or game sorts:
Even searching the exact title returns other games. Roblox did solve this issue for my game, but a likely different issue remains for other games affected like the one listed above. I want to make sure nobody is being left out.
Expected Behavior
Search and Game Sorts shouldn’t be hiding games unless they have obvious issues like being set to private or no age rating.
Actual Behavior
Unfortunately, what actually happens is some games are omitted from results and game sorts without warning to developers. It’s up to the developer to find out by trying to search for their own game or by hearing from their potential players.
Issue Area: Roblox Website Page URL:(ARENA)Time Simulator[BETA] - Roblox Impact: Very High Frequency: Sometimes Date First Experienced: 2022-11-29 00:11:00 (-07:00) Date Last Experienced: 2022-12-06 00:12:00 (-07:00)
This is something I’ve experienced when searching for games over the past few years, although maybe this issue is due to bugs in the age rating system, as the issue seems to be more prominent as of recently.
Unfortunately Roblox’s search algorithm seems to be flawed, and some games that clearly are the best match for the search term aren’t visible at all. It’s unclear to me if this is a search engine problem or if it is some bug related to the experience guidelines that Roblox has recently pushed out.
Either way, I agree this is extremely important, as this restricts the ability of developers’ games getting found and can even lead to copied experiences showing instead of the genuine one.
This has been happening to my game that I’ve spent over 120k on, I’m not rich at all and I recently launched a game called Fish Tower Tycoon, spent months working on this game making it unique and as good as I could
If you search for my game it won’t be found, 120k seemingly wasted
Which is very depressing as I invested all my time for the past 2 years dedicated to solely Roblox development.
This shadow ban has killed my previous game (Source of income) and now it’s making it impossible to move forward with my new game, I have no idea what to do anymore and I was heavily reliant on Roblox for my real life bills and responsibilities. I am from a country where it is extremely difficult to live in so I can’t just go get a job, as there are queues for everything.
Please Roblox, I beg of you to help us out as we help your platform get better.
This still seems to be an issue with games disappearing from the search results. Our game (Poop Simulator - Roblox) with nearly 3M visits has disappeared again over the past 2 hours. It had been dropping slowly in search position from 3rd or 4th when searching for “poop” to now being completely undiscoverable. My usual fix is to change the game description which seems to get it re-indexed but that does not seem to be working this time. Any advice?
Have spent around 50k rbx advertising in recent weeks.
Had concurrent players for the last few weeks. Retention stats where good - looks like I was on target for some success with this one finally.
Now it is hidden from search. Same as all my other games.
I find this behaviour utterly bizarre. It seems almost as if whoever is changing/manipulating the search algorithm is unaware of what basic pattern matching is and instead returns a random sort of the top 100 games.
Earlier today we were searching for a number of games from the Game Jam 2020 but couldn’t find them by name, despite having a list of what they were called, purely because the search algorithm is essentially non-functional. I have noticed that contrary to a ‘normal’ search engine, the more terms added to the query, the more non-sensical the results are.
I am not an amazing coder by an stretch of the imagination, but I would expect with 15 minutes & a quick google, I could produce far better results and improve this whole function.
Is it time for this area of the API to be exposed so we (ie the DevForum) can do a better job ourselves?
My game “pet fortress” also stopped showing up when searching it’s exact title-this has been a widely reported issue for over a year and there’s no resolution
Looks like it’s happening to many games including mine which is Secret Clicking Simulator - Roblox. It used to show up with the keyword “clicking” but now I can’t see it anywhere on the search page even when typing the full name. Hope this issue gets fixed soon as it’s affecting several people.
So my game Exploding Color Block has re-appeared in the search.
According to Game analytics, my new player numbers yesterday were down 50% while it was hidden.
While it was hidden, I did the following:
Changed my game Icon,
Changed my game description
Made some minor bug fixes and re-published my game
Not sure if any of these actions caused my game to get back in the index or perhaps Roblox themselves fixed a bug on the search page.
My older games are still missing as they have been for a few weeks now.
Has anybody else still having problems on this? Searching for the full game title “Poop Simulator” returns pages and pages of unrelated games so it is either not indexing correctly or the search returns are inaccurate. Still can’t find the original game jam ones we were trying to find from 2020.
I’m still having this issue. About 2 months ago, I was able to search ‘hotel’ and my game would appear in the results near the top. Now, I have to scroll about 20 rows before seeing my game.
Just checked our game again and yes, searching for the full game name “Poop Simulator” still places the game way down the list at position 100. This is a huge improvement compared to a few weeks ago when it was down around position ~2200.
I do wonder whether the search results are just badly “curated”, ie Roblox presents what it thinks users are searching for as it woefully underestimates the ability of it’s younger audience to find new content. Not that any of the returned results ever promote new content of course. I recently saw Zombie Attack from 2017 in the “Up and Coming” section of the Discover section.
Who knows. Without any meaning feedback or statement from Roblox, we have no idea why the Experience search produces meaningless results so much of the time. Do notice though that a search for a player name does not produce the same garbage results, so it is not a fault of a search algorithm. It is an intentional state.
I’ve been experiencing the exact same issue. A few months ago, my game was the 8th game that showed up when you searched “army” and it was suddenly moved 400+ squares down, resulting in a huge reduction in players. Really hoping Roblox can do something about the search algorithm soon.
Still experiencing this issue. My game back in January was finally doing so well as it was in the top 10-20 search results. Since a few months ago its nowhere to be seen and my games performance has completely disappeared. I’ve tried adding more keywords but still no improvements. My game now averages 1-2 visits a DAY. Use to get like 75-100 back in January. I still can’t get over this.
Searching for “time simulator” with quotes brings up this experience at a position around 76.
Because of low engagement, the experience does not appear in the search time simulator without quotes.