The Asset Store Search is not very good

News & General Discussion
1

i thought it was pretty standard these days to throw some money at google to handle your search functionality. Though i can understand not wanting to do that.

I feel the asset store’s search function isn’t quite up to scratch though. For example, i’m currently looking for some code/tools for working in r adians instead of degrees. Typing Radians in the asset store sends me to this:

And ONLY that. No search results page, it just jumps straight to that item. I’m not even developing for mobile, i have zero interest in mobile platforms, and this doesn’t have radians anywhere in the title. What the heck?

It can’t cope with spelling mistakes at all. Type one letter wrong and you get an empty page, possibly denying views/sales to asset sellers…

And finally, most significantly for this type of site, it needs some kind of linguistic root search. it shouldn’t be down to sellers to spam their listing with keywords. If i search for “destruction” i should also get items related to destruct, destroy, breaking, explosion, fracturing, fragmenting, splitting, wrecking, crushing, blasting… And probably many of the -ing less versions of those words too. With the search results ranked on relevance and linguistic distance from the original search term.

The latter two are kind of complex features to add to a search engine, but this is a community of professional programmers, i’m sure someone could figure it out. And if not, google is always hovering like a vulture to take your money and give you awesome search code.

The difficulty of finding what you want is a bit of a problem, i feel. And it’s disheartening for anyone who’s thinking of selling things here in the future. There are people making their livelihoods from this store, a good search is critical to them, and to unity technologies’ profits. Improvements are definitely needed imo.

make it happen.

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2

The search has always sucked, but it sure would be nice to find out Unity was working on it.

3

I would like the ability to FILTER/narrow search results once a search is done, e.g. narrow down by category or something within the search result.

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4

Kind of ironic how a big company that makes awesome software is using a dollar store search engine…

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5

If by “not good” you mean “completely-blows-when-wordpress-sites-have-better-search-filters”, yes, I agree.

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6

Lots of likes on our posts here, but not a lot of posting by those likers :stuck_out_tongue: A forum thread needs posts to continue the discussion and bring it to the top.

Is there a feedback issue on this topic created yet? http://feedback.unity3d.com/
i have a spare vote or two i could allocate

7

I haven’t had any issues with finding Assets that I’ve needed or may need.

For example, I searched ‘Mobile Sockets’ and got relevant searches for using .Net on Mobile platforms without needing Unity Pro… which is exactly what I was looking for.

In the past, when I was planning on working on a 2D adventure/platformer, I looked up ‘Tile Engine’ and found lots of Tile Editors that gave me options outside of being hunkered down to popular external programs such as Tiled.

Typing in ‘Secure Player Preferences’ showed a listing of Player Preference Assets with built-in Cryptology support to make it harder for a player to try to hack a game.

Not only that, but after actually finding these Assets, there are usually additional Assets that are relevant to one you decide to check out so you can always compare before making a purchase.

I’m still on the fence because additional improvements will always be welcome, but I don’t know if its fair to say the current searching isn’t good. It’s possible that you may need to generalize the search and then check out Assets that are actually relevant to your search and then see the listing of similar Assets from that Asset. It’s very possible that my opinion is biased because I knew what I was looking for and/or heard that the functionality was available before performing the search.

Lastly, there may not be extended functionality for something like you’ve asked because the demand may not have been popular enough to add such an Asset? Maybe you’ve found something niche and interesting, and you can develop this Asset and put it on the market so other people may buy it if they wish?

8

Agreed that the search leaves quite something things to be desired - but I don’t think using Google’s search would help much, at least not with what I’m missing: What I’d rather have is a way to e.g. filter by publisher but still have the rest of the navigation available (just filtered to only contain packages / categories of that publisher). This would be really useful e.g. for just browsing all the stuff that’s available from Unity Technologies.

9

The issue here is that e-commerce, and stores in general, are NOT like other systems.

To clarify farther

That’s great, but i have. Therefore this is irrelevant. If it fails to meet any needs at all, it fails.

You’re saying that I, the user and purchaser, need to put more effort into giving my money to unity? Do you see the flaw there?

The demand is this thread. No other demand, past or future, is needed.

Now these statements may come across as odd. But what you need to realise is that commerce runs on a different philosophy to every other type of system.

  • Features are not added on an as-needed basis. They are added on a “cover all possible bases just in case” basis.

  • People are not inclined to put a lot of effort into paying for things. If one user (me) takes the trouble to make a complaint, and point out problems with the system, it can reasonably be extrapolated that user speaks for a hundred thousand users, you cannot easily quantify the number of people who tried, gave up, and just kept their money. The userbase is silent

  • Commerce is reputation based , more than many things. One lost sale now can be a hundred lost sales in the future, from friends and family they won’t recommend. Losing a sale for any reason must be avoided.

When the application of your system directly translates to “making money”, there is basically no boundary on what you should be willing to spend to make it work better. As long as changes are objectively improvements, and add benefits without harming any interests.

If unity is determined to keep absolute control of the system, they need to hire contractors to work on this ASAP. It’s a huge industry and there’s a huge market of people who specialise in doing it on a temporary basis.

If that’s not so important, then they can accomplish it probably far cheaper, by giving money to google for a full featured search engine. Either way the current situation is objectively bad

10

I understand your point.

But if you want your voice to be heard, you should ask for this topic to be moved to the Feedback section where more of the Unity team will become aware of peoples opinions on the Asset store and possibly implement a change based on that feedback.

Making a statement here will likely just add to debate, but if you’re looking for a petition to implement something I’m pretty sure you’ll have more success there.

11

The forum search is even worse and it the new layout recently actually hurt rather than help. I like to be able to check out assets on the forum before I buy and I find it really hard to find stuff now on the forums. If I don’t find a forum, I typically will not consider buying it. Sellers should really put the forum link in their asset store link.

12

Debate is a good thing, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

I have already mentioned the feedback system in an earlier post in this thread (read up). I have not made a petition there yet because:

  1. It seems highly likely that one would already exist. Creating and directing people towards a duplicate would be a waste of votes (i specifically requested help in locating that duplicate)

  2. I am not a search expert. I’d prefer the petition be written by someone who is, and is intricately familiar with everything a good search engine could have. I have, at best, only a conceptual grasp of a portion of those things. The petition should be all-inclusive and basically a large template of what a search engine should be.

  3. I’m not too familiar with the feedback system in general, having only discovered it yesterday.

I might eventually make one if someone else doesn’t, but i think i’m not the person to do it.

13

The AS search is terrible, extremely primitive, and always has been.

If you miss a space between 2 words like “Refract2D” it gives you nothing.

14

Bump

Yes, AS search seems a bit lacking.

I just deal. It’s sometimes a pain but not my biggest issue at the moment.