Search improvements

GodKilla

Improved search string/pattern matching: When you search for Civilization 6 or Europa Universalis 4 it does not find any results because it only matches strictly Civilization VI and Universalis IV.
Very often I'm not certain about the actual spelling, ":" or "-" "definitive" or "ultimate" etc
Other search engines provide closest/similar results and interpret latin numbers correctly.

I.e. if I'm not sure "was it Trevor Saves the Universe?" I can just search for it and find "Trover Saves the Universe"

GodKilla

GodKilla Nice, I see this was implemented! That's quick!

rob006

GodKilla ":", "-" or other special characters are ignored since the beginning, so it shouldn't affect search results. Handling typos or roman/arabic numbers conversion is more tricky, and it is handled individually for each game by adding alternative names used by search engine. So using "6" may not always work for games with "VI" i title.

chotnik

rob006 how about using alternatives i.e for VI to 6 only if there is "gamename(space)VI" or generally "(space)VI(space/end)". This should cover 99% of cases for roman numbers

GodKilla

rob006 How about similar search results like in Google or other search engines?

There are the free fuse.js and fuzzyset.js for fuzzy search and results based on relevancy.

rob006

chotnik Yes, this is one of planned improvements for search, but there is no ETA for this. We're now focused on other features, since search already works fine in 99% of cases.

rob006

GodKilla There are the free fuse.js and fuzzyset.js for fuzzy search and results based on relevancy.

I don't think that JavaScript libraries will be useful in this case (we need to search games list on backend on database level). Using some kind of fulltext search with relevancy metric is an option, but it has its drawbacks and we need more tests for this. And we definitely won't pursue Google in their own field. 😉