Narrowing Searches for more meaningful results

I find it challenging to narrow searches to only define the item I am looking for. Adding additional search terms only increases the number of items that turn up, making the search process even more challenging. This is particularly annoying when trying to set-up a search to “follow”, because no many false positives seem to come up in GameFlip Notifications. If there are options for Advanced Search functions on GameFlip, I can’t find any documentation on them.

I strongly suggest adding support for boolean search functions. (e.g. quotes, +/- , comma separated terms in brackets, etc…) to help efficiently narrow the search to arrive at more precise results. There are some examples here on boolean search principals:

Also, it would be helpful to allow search terms by the area of interest on the listing. (i.e. to only apply to item titles, descriptions or comments, respectively) On many occasions I have included search terms that don’t appear in either the title or description, yet are flagged as a match. The year of release is also a handy search term that could apply well to movies, media and even games if that became a listing option.

If nothing else please allow AND/+ function support for followed searches, to stop the endless false notifications that make the “following searches” feature nearly useless.

Hello @DonkeyNose!

We appreciate you taking the time to give us your feedback.

We’ll make sure to pass along the suggestion to the team and see what we can do.

Hope you have a great day and stay tuned to future updates :wink:

God Speed! :trident:

It may be helpful to show Gameflip examples of what you want to search but can’t. From what you’re describing, perhaps we want something like “title: FIFA 21” in search, right? My guess is that a lot people are stuffing keywords, making it easy to get false positives.

You can search online for “advanced search” or “boolean search” and see all kinds of ways to improve search functions. You will find there are a lot of conventions and similarities across many of them. Most all marketplaces allow for some sort of advanced search. Most work well enough and certainly work better than how searching on GameFlip works today. eBay seems to have an effective advanced search implementation that I use regularly to narrow searches to include exactly what I am looking for.

Below are some examples of searches gone wrong and some suggested ways to make them work better

Example #1 a Game Search:
Searching for the Steam game “Dungeons of Doom” produces pages after pages of results. None are for the game titled “Dungeons of Doom”. Though there is a game called “Deep Dungeons of Doom” that comes up in the search.

What I would like to do is search for a game titled “Dungeons of Doom” with no other results showing items that include just the word Dungeons, or just the word Doom, in the title or elsewhere in the listing. Also I would like the words arranged in a specific order so that the 3 words would not be scattered about the listing. In addition, it would be nice to exclude items with the word Deep in the title. A fairly standard way of doing this is to enclose the exact search term in quotes and preface the terms to be excluded with the word NOT (all caps) or just a minus sign.

A standard way to express a more exacting search would be: “dungeons of doom” -deep

Example #2 a Followed Search for a Movie:
I just received a notification for a search I am following that did not produce a result that included the title of interest. I had set up a saved search for the movie “The Road Within” and I got a notification for “Mad Max: Fury Road” several days later. The words “the” and “within” show up in the movie’s description and thus formed a match. This sort of thing happens a lot and is particularly frustrating when I have dozens of searches saved or “followed” as GameFlip calls it.

In this example it would be nice to search only the item title or better yet, the title and the release date. So, I would expect to see a choice of areas within the Movies category for which to apply my search. (e.g. Title, Release Date, Description, Comments,…) with a check box next to each one.

A typical way to express such a search would be: “the road within” 2014
[then I would tick the boxes next to the options Title and Release Date so that there would be a positive match if both terms showed up in only the item Title or the Release Date. Therefore, if the item title in the listing was: “The Road Within Director’s Cut (2014)”, it would register a match, even if the information in the date field was incorrect or wasn’t populated.

Another approach would be to call out the sections to be considered in each respective part of the search terms. The drawback of this approach would be, if the info is spread across different sections of the listing, no match would be found.

An example of such a search would be: TITLE:“the road within”, DATE:2014

I hope these examples help to clarify the problem and potential solutions. But, quite honestly any form of advanced search that includes exact match options would be better than what exists today. So, there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to implement it. If the exact search conditions only applied to saved searches being “followed”, it would be a huge step in the right direction.


On the issue of stuffing listings with key words: This sort of practice simply isn’t allowed in most online marketplaces. It would be up to the user community to report such listings and for GameFlip to suspend any blatant violators. This should stop the problem very quickly. Once people know the policies will be enforced they will abide by them.

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Well explained post!

I think keyword stuffing is hard to police. Ideally those irrelevant keywords get ignored or score lower.

+1

I’m struggling to find lowest prices because of the fuzzy search results.

An alternative/complementary solution would be to use unique identifiers for every game/item. This way, the “search similar” button will at least provide exact results. But I think the OP’s proposal would be easier to implement.

+1 Huge Bump on an older thread.

This suggestion was given in May and it’s still extremely difficult to search for specific items. Just today I had an issue where a buyer could not find the specific items he was looking. Luckily he had a PC and was able to narrow the results a bit further, but he should be able to locate the items through the app with no issue.

This brings me to another quick suggestion. Please allow sellers to change their online status from the website, not just the mobile app. The app is spotty to say the least. It takes me multiple tries to login and accessing messaging isn’t the greatest.

I know they were just released, but we should be seeing Pokemon Diamond and Pearl joining the In Game Items list. The current Sword and Shield category is being flooded by inaccurate listings for BDSP.

I am guessing that GameFlip likes it when members dig through piles of senseless search results and get hammered with false notifications on followed searches. Because, otherwise they would have corrected this obvious usability problem long ago. “Time on site” is apparently what they are after.

I’m afraid you are wrong here.

We are working hard not only to improve our search but to improve other aspects of the website and our apps. Your suggestion was a pretty great one and it was shared with the team, but all changes need to be evaluated and go to a queue where our team will work on.

Whenever we have a new update about this or any other aspect that have a huge impact in user experience, we will let you know.

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