yeah, we've been working on it. A lot of queries, especially short queries, were not working at all. E.g., if you had a short query like "rich" it wasn't surfacing any of the players that literally play as the name "rich". Tweaking search is hard; a change might make some queries better, but some queries worse.
What's the query you're using? Is there something that you're looking for that you're unable to find?
now i see that when i search "arin", it actually shows the profiles with the exact same name
before it searched only the people who had this word included somewhere in their nick like "marine" but not the name itself
so.. thanks for this
(Though for some reason when I search "arin" the first player who comes up is ferrari_430, i guess that verified players have always a preference even when it doesn't match completely)
also one question, how do I search dotabuff profile with steam profile/id?
(Though for some reason when I search "arin" the first player who comes up is ferrari_430, i guess that verified players have always a preference even when it doesn't match completely)
yeah. A good example of this would be that it's common for people looking for Admiral Bulldog to just search "bulldog", all lowercase, but his literal name is "Alliance.AdmiralBulldog", for now at least. People search for the people they've played with, their friends, etc, but a large amount of searches are for pro players. There are lots of players that play with the literal handle "bulldog", so if we only cared about the relevance on the names searching "bulldog" wouldn't turn up Admiral Bulldog for several hundred results, but the vast majority of the time, that's the bulldog that people are looking for.
also one question, how do I search dotabuff profile with steam profile/id?
you can search player id, which for bulldog is 76482434, and for you is 92536008. Right now the steam profile urls and steam IDs aren't searchable, but I'd like to make them searchable in the future, since people do search like that. Also the time sorting isn't that great. Before we cared too much about how recently someone played, and now the recency sorting is kinda broken, but the relevance sorting is better. Before, 'arin' would turn up a 'marine' before a literal 'arin' so long as the 'marine' player had played more recently.
Just gotta fix one thing at a time ;)
imo the old search algorithm (the one back from 2013 / early 2014) was MUCH better, it searched for old aliases so it was super useful because most people keep changing their nicknames
for example if you search for sano now you'll find my old inactive account http://www.dotabuff.com/players/86735371 but won't find this one just because I changed my nickname today
back then I was playing just at the moment as I was trying to search my name and couldn't find my profile (while the dotabuff staff gave me the same answer as you did now with the profile activity) so idk
now's all good though
thanks for your answer
Please sign in to post comments.
Is it just me, or is Dotabuff's search algorithm changed? It no longer follows my exact query and includes a lot more results with altered character order.