Some games with short titles don't show up in results

[Nathaniel Watson]

Noticed this with the game INK - searching both with the API and via the site for INK returns a lot of results, but none of them are the game being looked for. Searching by SteamID does return the game (http://www.cheapshark.com/api/1.0/games?steamAppID=385710) so it is in the database.

Other games with three-letter titles do show up in results, but are usually 9+ places down the list, e.g. Dex.

I'm not sure how the results are sorted, but an option to sort by closest match would be useful, but I totally understand that something like that may not be not easy to do.

[ArmoredCavalry]

Yeah, the partial text search/match could definitely be improved. There is an "exact" match option on the deals endpoint, not sure if that would help?

Otherwise, I can probably do one (or both) of the following -

a) Add the "exact" match option to the games endpoint as well

b) Look into improving the result sorting (e.g. exact matches first by default)

What are your thoughts?

[Nathaniel Watson]

Yeah, I had a look at using just the deals endpoint, but I need the SteamID for each game in addition to the deal/pricing info, so that wouldn't work unfortunately.

I think either way would work for me - I'm parsing the titles from Humble Bundle pages, so I only really need exact matches anyway (punctuation seems to be the only thing that differs between the Humble Bundle titles and CheapShark, but those still seem to match when using exact=1 on the deals endpoint, so shouldn't be a problem).

[ArmoredCavalry]

Went ahead and added an exact flag option to the games endpoint, check it out and let me know if this works for you!

I will also be looking into improving the fuzzy searching matching to try to get the closer results to come up first, since this is also an improvement that I think would benefit the site search.

[Nathaniel Watson]

Sweet, that's working nicely at my end. Thanks!

[ArmoredCavalry]

Finally did this update, the title search will now return games in the order based on how close their title is to the search string (instead of just random order any games which contain the string searched).

[ArmoredCavalry]

Completed changes required for better string matching.