Group searches fail to balance search terms as effectively as other search categories (Players, Games, Library, and Catalog). An example of this is demonstrated with the search term “chaos gaming”
Players, Games, Library, and Catalog appropriately balance the search terms and reasonable responses are returned (search results below)
In fact, the group with the actual name “chaos gaming” can only be found on the twelfth page of groups. For anyone using the search function to try and find that group - there is almost no point. If someone were to say in game “Hey - check out my group, chaos gaming!” there would be no way to use the ROBLOX search engine to efficiently and effectively find that group. It’s actually faster to just search “chaos gaming roblox” on Google - as that returns the group which matches that name as the first result.
This seems to be occurring because search terms are not being effectively balanced. Rather than searching for groups with “chaos gaming” or groups with both “chaos” and “gaming”, the search engine seems to be returning groups with “chaos” and groups with “gaming”. As a result, this leads to cluttered, inaccurate, and likely irrelevant search returns of any group that has a variant of “gaming”, such as game, games, gamers, etc. (this is why so many game studios were returned) or any variant of “chaos”.
I would recommend adjusting the search engine to search for groups that include all inputted search terms (in either name or description) to resolve this issue and provide more accurate results. Furthermore, it makes sense that any group that has a name exactly matching the search terms should be returned first. As it is, the group search function is almost more unhelpful than it is helpful for finding specific groups (particularly those that do not have member counts in the high thousands).
What feature was removed? Searching for groups remains a feature on the ROBLOX website, the issue is that search results are extremely inaccurate and inconsistent with other categories (Games, Library, Players, Catalog) which provide much more accurate search results. Because the search results for other categories return much more relevant information and groups doesn’t, it seems (from the outside looking in) that there’s an issue with how search terms correlate to search output in the Groups category. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense why the site would be intentionally switched over to a more ineffective way of returning search results.
Before the results have turned instead of relevance in the name or if the group has it in their description or something. I believe it’s supposed to help tagging or something idk. But this has been around for ages and I think I’d be fixed by now if it were a bug. I’ve also linked a topic about the results and tags.
I have also been experiencing this problem aswell. I have been searching up things like “Developers” and such and instead of it searching things like that, it searches up popular groups with similar letters. EX: groups that start with D or De. If they could fix this, this would be amazing
This happens to me as well. Say I searched ‘Deluxe Hotels.’ which is an actual group, the name is exact, it would come up with groups related to ‘Hotel’, not the group I am looking for.
I’m sick of this keyword search algorithm. What kind of search splits the search query into keywords and finds the most popular item that has any of those keywords? Using this algorithm, having a broader, more distinct name, allows you to be less findable, as every single other item that has any word inside of your name will be considered before you.
At this point you have to assume the horrendous group/ experience search is intentional. Getting search to a basic level of functionality is not some huge mysterious coding task, most devs on this forum could vastly improve it in a single day…
