Search a product directly or use partial titles such as “zombie animations”(just an example).
See how the results are not showing the most relevant up top.
Expected Result
Products with that searched title or relevant keywords repeated in description or tags should appear at the top of search.
Observed Result
Random products appear before the actual product searched.
Platform
Safari, chrome
Operating System
iOS 18, windows
Upload an image
Additional Notes
The Komodo visibility shader is just an example, it happens with most product searches. There are other forum threads about it happening to other sellers as well.
Great someone finnaly brings this up!
I also noticed that search got way worse while shopping but I thought I was the only one. It was very good for my taste until January but then something changed (Unfortunately the Fab team stopped doing changelogs so we have no idea what is going on )
Its January so sales arent that good usually but while chatting with some top selling developers they all shared the same experience of having one sale in two weeks which isnt usual. (My sales arent THAT bad but it seems like for the majority of people they are)
Yeah I typed “zombie animations” and everything except zombie animation packs showed up. I had to scroll for 20 seconds before I found a zombie animation pack and it wasn’t a very good one.
It’s unbelievable that a search in this condition actually made it to production. And to top it off, they dropped this version on a Friday, so they won’t even notice the mess until Monday!
Yeah if I do a search for “rd” I would have thought that products starting with “rd” would be displayed first - instead a whole lot of products that have a subtitle “do oR Die” get listed first.
Yeah it’s bad, someone did a poll in the discord and almost every single person said their sales are worse off. Even if you do outside marketing the search won’t show your product so that wouldn’t even help.
Sales were bad this month even when search was normal, Now brace yourselves, everyone. We’re in for a though period ahead. We’re essentially relying on sheer luck for people to stumble upon our products.
Same for me… E.g., when I try to search for low poly nature I can’t find my pack… which title is “Low poly nature”. After I filter down to price and category and scroll a lot I finally can find it… but it’s way lower than I think it should be: e.g., if someone searches for “low poly nature” I doubt they are interested in high poly/realistic packs or artic packs or water&sand packs etc…
I am guessing that now search takes into account tags, but the tags are given way too much weight vs other elements like title and description. E.g., when I search for ‘mushroom’ I can find both of my nature packs ranked quite high:
So yea, adding ‘nature’ to tags did boost search ranking by a lot. It seems also that if you have less keywords and less description you will land higher in ranking. This is also weird choice for the search algorithm.
I experimented a bit with tags, and yes, they have a lot more weight now. It’s similar to how the UE marketplace worked, I recall adding all the keywords as tags and not worrying about the title back then. But the problem with FAB is that, unlike UE Marketplace, the tags we have available are very limited, and we cannot create new ones, I feel like they are not enough to describe my products properly. If tags worked the same way they did in UE Marketplace, that would solve the issue.
My sales are awful compared to the old marketplace in general, but in December I made at least a few. Now making only 1 per month seems like something is broken.
Indeed, i just tested too went from 7th line result to 2nd line
I remember checking 1-2 week ago that my product was on 2nd line, guess we have to check our product daily ranking.
It really weirds that other tag name not in the title affect so much the ranking relevance.
At the beginning of Fab title was everything. The less description you had the better (listings with super short description where surfacing to the top of search). That’s why my other pack is now called “low poly graveyards” (and it was “forgotten graveyards” before). Then it was fixed and it was kind of working, but tags were totally ignored. Now that tags are taken into account they are the most important thing and title looks like is ignored (or weighted very low). The number of tags feels like it’s normalization issue (i.e., search 101 problem), that was similar problem when longer description where penalized… Tf.idf is known for 50+ years now… Search in general is hard, but it doesn’t really look like the team tackling search on Fab has any prior experience in building search / information retrieval systems.
If they also add rating weight and game system/plugin with latest unreal version into the Relevance algorithms, that would be so much useful too.
I know orbital-market has a rating weight since my product get up ranking when i got some new 5 stars.
Am wondering if fab team considering to revert back to old ue marketplace since we have no update on the roadmap nor release notes and the old seller portal is still working with the old data so they didnt wipe out the old marketplace at least.
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