Can asset search be improved?

Asset searching is wonderful, and is a great way to find tokens, but I think two changes would help it immensely.

First is google search, I can't tell you how many times I'm implementing a specific monster and get no results from all searches on roll20. Only to go to google and have the first 3 results be what I'm looking for. Then I have to go through the process of saving the picture, usually making it smaller so it doesn't take up as much of my save space, then uploading it to roll20. Straight from google searching would greatly improve this process.

Second is to remove Dunjinni results. I don't know why but they are rarely on topic or even close to what is being searched. What's worse is much better results get hidden further down the list because of the shear number of Dunjinni results that come up.

I don't  know if either of these are feasible, but they would help immensely.

As the Devs said over here:

After doing some digging, this is what's the cause of this issue:

Back in the early days of Roll20, Google's search engine API was free and readily available to be used. This was utilized for our web search for the Art Library. At the time, Google had claimed that this would be a freely available asset for a long time.

As you can probably guess where this story is going, they decided later to lock their API behind a very significant price tag.

Nowadays, when someone runs searches in the art library, it's using search results that we scraped back when we still had the API available. Those search results are tied to the keywords that were searched with at the time. This list of compiled searches are nearly four years old now, and limited to the keywords that were utilized by a fraction of the userbase that we have now.

Ideally, we would find another search engine API to utilize, but so far we haven't found one that is financially feasible to license.

When things change it will be announced, but for now we're stuck with what we have.

GenKitty said:

As the Devs said over here:

After doing some digging, this is what's the cause of this issue:

Back in the early days of Roll20, Google's search engine API was free and readily available to be used. This was utilized for our web search for the Art Library. At the time, Google had claimed that this would be a freely available asset for a long time.

As you can probably guess where this story is going, they decided later to lock their API behind a very significant price tag.

Nowadays, when someone runs searches in the art library, it's using search results that we scraped back when we still had the API available. Those search results are tied to the keywords that were searched with at the time. This list of compiled searches are nearly four years old now, and limited to the keywords that were utilized by a fraction of the userbase that we have now.

Ideally, we would find another search engine API to utilize, but so far we haven't found one that is financially feasible to license.

When things change it will be announced, but for now we're stuck with what we have.

I had a big response typed out about how I added google images searches for free on my own site, when I realized, that's not the easiest solution. I'm guessing when we pull an image from the search, roll20's API just saves the image address and not the actual image. Why couldn't we associate an image address with a token or handout? Just manually do what the search does? We could google search for what we want, copy the address over and not have to take up valuable time and space uploading it to our PC's then Roll20 servers.

I could see myself making free adventure paths, and host the images of maps and handouts on my own website.

I am not sure if this has any relation to the situation with searches, but I have encountered a few situations with searches on the roll20 platform for marketplace items, it delivers a list of marketplace premium Asset items matching the keyword. However, The list only shows the first 100 items or so from the keyword selection, and often times only shows one artist work in all 100 items. This is problematic for players, DM's, and Artist. One it doesn't give a variety of choices for the user to pick from, and it shows only one artist work, with hundreds of great artist on roll20 marketplace it would be nice if the platform search could yield more results, or replace the individual items with marketplace artist packs matching the keyword.

Maybe others have encountered the same problem as me, or has a better solution.

Are marketplace assets doing the same thing, where new assests aren't showing up in the search because you're just reusing older searches?