Searches for specific titles can fail because customers choose search strings that were not included as part of the Title, Alternate Titles, or other catalog metadata, and are therefore not indexed by Bing. To help make games and other media easier to find in the catalog, the Xbox Live Discovery team and Bing have identified a set of alternate title guidelines for publishers. We’ve identified these guidelines by analyzing the performance of popular Xbox queries, and by paying particular attention to why some searches perform badly.
The best way to specify alternate search terms for your title is to add them to the Alternate Titles field, which can be done at submission time. You can add as many search terms as you like, to ensure that your content is surfaced when a user searches for them.
The Alternate Titles field can be found in the Marketing Info tab of the Xbox One Catalog Availability Submission Form.
The goal is to identify as many as possible of the words and phrases that customers will enter when they search for your content, and then to make sure that you include as many as possible of those words and phrases in the Alternate Titles field.
Also, be prepared to periodically revisit and update the alternate titles for your content. A popular title might develop one or more nicknames as people start playing it and player communities develop around it-or people might start referring to it by using a phrase that usefully (if unofficially) distinguishes it from another title. For example, the first version of a game might start being referred to with an Arabic number 1 or a Roman numeral I appended to the official title once the first sequel is released.
The following guidelines will help you to anticipate a wide range of possible search terms for your content, which you can then include as Alternate Titles during publishing. The guidelines also address the difficulties caused by spoken search terms.
The following examples use a mixture of game titles from Microsoft Studios and imaginary titles meant to illustrate each guideline.
Consider the various ways in which voice recognition might interpret your title when the title is spoken aloud, including the effects of applicable regional accents. If possible, run practical experiments in which you search for your title by using voice recognition on an Xbox Console.
| Title | Alternate titles |
|---|---|
| A Game Within | Sabrewulf |
| with in | Saber, Sabre, Wolf |
The more popular your game, the more likely it is that it will become known—and searched for—by its acronym. The acronym may be simply the initials of the official title, or it might be a nickname that evolves among gamers.
| Title | Alternate titles |
|---|---|
| Killer Instinct | Kl |
When searching for a title that includes both an acronym and a number, it is common to omit blank spaces—particularly if the search is being entered on a controller, where typing is cumbersome.
To put this more simply: For any title of the form <acronym> <Space> or <number>, expect that a significant number of users will omit the space.
| Title | Alternate titles |
|---|---|
| Forza Motorsport 5 | F5, FM5, F, FM |
If your official title includes punctuation marks, most people won’t include that punctuation when searching, so include at least one non-punctuated alternate version.
| Title | Alternate titles |
|---|---|
| G.A.M.E | game |
For franchises that have multiple editions or parts, people searching will use Roman numerals and modern numerals for edition and part numbers interchangeably. If your official title includes Roman numerals, consider including alternate titles that include the corresponding Arabic numerals, and vice versa.
| Title | Alternate titles |
|---|---|
| Forza 5 | Forza V |
| GAME III | GAME 3 |
When a media title employs nonstandard or unusual spelling or grammar, many people will use standard spelling or grammar when searching for it, and voice recognition may not correctly understand what the searcher intends. Consider likely spelling variants of your title to include as Alternate Titles.
| Title | Alternate titles |
|---|---|
| Forza 5 | V |
| GAME III | 3 |
| Play 4Square | foursquare, four, square, 4, IV |
If your game is for a genre that is not covered by the standard genre categories available at publishing time, include the specialized genre name in the Alternate Titles.
| Title | Alternate titles |
|---|---|
| Top Goal Scorers | soccer, football |
You do not need to be concerned with case sensitivity. This is handled automatically by Bing.
Bing handles double width (Unicode) characters and accented characters automatically, so you do not need to add alternate titles to account for such characters.