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News video games 06 October 2022, 13:13

author: Adrian Werner

Steam's Improved Search Engine Brings Valve Praise

Valve has implemented further improvements to the game search engine on Steam. Now it is not intimidated by any kinds of typos.

Valve continues to improve the game search engine on Steam.

  1. As one Reddit user noted, now even when typing a title with typos into the search window, Steam is able to guess what game we meant and correctly suggest available titles. As an example, the phrase "blloonsz" was given, after which it displayed games in the Bloons series.
  2. In a thread on Reddit, Valve employee confirmed that this change had been tested for some time and was recently made available to all users.
  3. The change met with great approval from the community, which was eager to see similar changes elsewhere on the Internet.
Steams Improved Search Engine Brings Valve Praise - picture #1
Source: Reddit.

Interestingly, however, these correct recommendations only appear in the list that appears when you type a phrase. If you press Enter or click on the magnifying glass icon, you are taken to a page containing games that have the exact phrase in the title. In the case of "blloonsz" there are no such productions, so the search result is empty. However, in such a situation the website adds a helpful question: "Did you mean "bloons"?", accurately recognizing what we meant.

The system doesn't work perfectly and doesn't always recognize a game correctly after a phrase with typos, but even so, its introduction is a big improvement and should make it easier for players to find games on Steam.

It is worth mentioning that this is not the only recent improvement to the service's search engine. In early September after a user's suggestion, a bug was fixed in a just few hours, which caused that after typing the phrase "Tales of", we've seen not to games from Bandai Namco Entertainment's famous jRPG series, but games that simply had the word "of" in the title.

  1. Steam - official website

Other examples of improved search on Steam

Steams Improved Search Engine Brings Valve Praise - picture #2
Steams Improved Search Engine Brings Valve Praise - picture #3

Adrian Werner

Adrian Werner

A true veteran of the Gamepressure newsroom, writing continuously since 2009 and still not having enough. He caught the gaming bug thanks to playing on his friend's ZX Spectrum. Then he switched to his own Commodore 64, and after a short adventure with 16-bit consoles, he forever entrusted his heart to PC games. A fan of niche productions, especially adventure games, RPGs and games of the immersive sim genre, as well as a mod enthusiast. Apart from games, he devourers stories in every form - books, series, movies, and comics.

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