Been meaning to post about this for a few weeks. After not using the feature for six years I decided to heed the Unity mention that labels are used by Asset Store search. Accordingly I added a bunch of platformer related asset labels to various objects in Platformer PRO ( Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making ).
To my surprise when the latest update was approved, not only did none of these terms get picked up in search, but some of the older search terms which used to hit the kit no longer did (the description and text fields hadn’t changed at all, maybe just a coincidence).
Did this change recently? Did these labels ever work? Any other thoughts on how the search terms work?
From an end user standpoint it’s better than ever with the new filtering options and interaction with the category list. As for the actual indexing of content, I haven’t got any assets on there myself so I haven’t actually cared about that.
But you’re saying that you’ve added labels to materials, textures, models inside the project itself and these used to be indexed?
I don’t use the label features myself but they should be getting picked up. You might want to report a bug or hit up @caitlyn if it doesn’t seem to be working. Could be a known issue with all of the changes coming through.
As of a couple weeks ago, the new search system introduced during the week of Unite Boston:
No longer uses asset labels
Gives priority to search terms in this order:
Category
Product name
Description text
Popularity
May or may not consider the publisher’s name in the search. (The Asset Store folks were working on this; don’t know if it’s fixed yet.)
So if you search for “input”, all products in categories containing the word “input” (such as Scripting > Input - Output) will appear above any products with “input” in their name or description. And an unrated product (0 stars, 0 reviews) with “input” in its name will appear above a product with 1000 5-star reviews that only has “input” in its description.
Note: This may have changed recently! The Asset Store folks are always hard at work making the entire system better to use for all of us, customers and publishers alike.
Do you know this for a fact or are you guessing? I’ve implemented and worked with a lot of different search engines at work and they are all much more complex than that. Usually you assign a score multiplier to the things in your index. And then the search engine uses its algorithm to sort the search result for your query according to the final accumulated scores.
In this case the score for category, product name and description may be a higher than the score for popularity, but you only have one of each of those, while the score for popularity is multiplied both by the number of reviews and the review ratings. And usually the search engine takes into account if your query is part of a word or an entire word, how many times your query appears in the product name / description etc.
I have no insight into what search engine the asset store uses or how they’ve set it up, but I have to imagine it’s more involved than what you’re saying here.
This was obviously a huge concern for Asset Store publishers when the new search features rolled out. There was a huge discussion in the Asset Store Publishers Google Group. I believe these are the criteria we identified at the time through experimentation, but since the search functionality is under development it’s constantly evolving.
