API Searches don't return games that exist on the IGDB site
I'm having an issue where preforming API searches doesn't return games that exists on the IGDB site.
For example, these two Pokemon games exist on IGDB:
https://www.igdb.com/games/pokemon-x
https://www.igdb.com/games/pokemon-y
But when I search via the API I get no results back.
I'm searching this endpoint:
https://api-v3.igdb.com/games
And here's my search body:
search "Pokémon x"; fields id,name,cover.imageid,firstrelease_date; where cover != null; limit 5;
I get an empty JSON result.

Hey there.
Search in the API is indeed in need of a big overhaul, this is planned and in our backlog, unfortunately it isn’t on our immediate roadmap and therefore not currently being worked on.
Apologies in the meantime, we will keep our API community up to date as soon as work on this feature begins.
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ZeroesOnes commented
I've noticed the following behavior:
Target game: Pokémon X Version
Search #1: "Pokémon X" => no results
Search #2: "Pokemon X" => results including the target gameIt seems the normalization of the game title ("Pokemon" vs "Pokémon") is the only variation that can be searched against.
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Summer commented
Please fix this soon, its a major issue with the API.
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darklinkpower commented
This seems to be an issue with the API itself and has been a bug for a while. It has affected Playnite's IGDB metadata plugin: https://github.com/JosefNemec/Playnite/issues/1719
There are constantly people reporting this issue but it's a bug with the API itself. The API doesn't return the same results as the webpage and has issues with special characters like accents (For example, pokémon), hyphens, etc.
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joekw commented
Add ‘Below’ to this list as a search term that returns a blank array when the site returns 26 results.
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joekw commented
I’ve had this issue with Pokemon for about a year now. Is this being worked on?
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MistaProg commented
I'm having similar issues with common search single words such as "who" "we" "are" "now" all returning 0 results.