Steam Search update improves search a lot
Valve Software, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, launched support for experimental features back in 2019. One of these experiments was designed to improve search on the platform. We reviewed Steam Search improvements back in 2019 when the experiment launched and liked what we experienced.
Valve added long-requested options to narrow down search results by price or by tag. Steam searched across the entire database previously which resulted in large result listings that would often include lots of games a gamer was not interested in.
If you run a search on Steam today, you will notice that the experimental search options have been integrated on the main site.
Steam displays the options to narrow down results by price, preference, or by tag on the search results page. There are plenty of additional filters available including game feature, number of players, operating system, VR support or language.
If you only want games with a price of $10 or less, or only discounted games, you can achieve that easily by modifying the price filter.
Similarly, you may use the tag filter to only return games that have that tag. Tags range from broader classifications such as shooter or strategy to very specific categorizations such as "action roguelike", "automobile sim", or "spelling". Tags may be combined to only display games that match all selected tags.
Another useful new option is the ability to hide items that are already in the library, on the whishlist, or on the ignore list. The latter filter is active automatically, the other two filters need to be enabled manually.
Other useful options that the new Steam Search supports include filtering by language to only display games that support a particular language.
Closing Words
Steam Search has always been the Achilles heel of Steam as it did not offer enough filtering options. While you could browse games by tag before, adding these options to search improves the whole experience significantly. Add to that the ability to mix and match other filters, e.g. by language or by price, and you are able to get fine-tuned search result listings that provide a much better user experience.
Now You: Are you a Steam customer? Do you like the new options?
Searching Steam is like searching google play. Your shown what they want you to see, not what your are searching for.
Steam Member for 16 years.
Are you a Steam customer?
Nope. I buy real game disks for Xbox, and enjoy free/liberated copies for PC. If I like it, then I buy the disk, if it’s available.
I never buy games online. I only buy games in real stores and via craigslist.
I don’t play online multiplayer games. When I play with friends, we use a LAN.
I’m still a fan of Valve, and I’m glad to see they’re coming out with Half-Life: Alyx. That just might be enough to get me into VR, but likely not.
I appreciate the filtering, but search itself seems worse. Often searching for the exact name of a game gives results without that game, or with it way down in the bottom third of the results.
Steam search has always been this way to me. Many services/websites have horrible search. I cannot imagine the kind of programmer who looks at that and says to themselves “what a great job i’ve done, writing this piece of nonsene”. It’s embarrasing.