author: Miriam Moszczynska
Valve Improved Steam Search Engine in 6 Hours
Technical support on Steam remains vigilant. A problem with the platform's search engine was fixed within hours.
A rather annoying bug appeared on Steam yesterday. It occurred when searching for games using the browser in the client, as well as on the website. Valve wasted no time and the search engine returned to proper shape just a few hours after the glitch was reported.
Steam support is vigilant
Yesterday, one of Valve's platform users reported an unusual error. Here's the thing, after searching for the phrase "Tales of" Steam did not show game titles which began with such words at all.. Instead, it prioritized the "of" found in the middle. A screenshot showing the glitch can be found below.
A screenshot taken before the fix.Source: Reddit
A post reporting this bug was answered six hours later by one of Valve employees. He thanked players for reporting the bug and informed them that from now on searches should work normally.
"It should be better now. We updated the weights for name matches, which will give you better results for queries like this," wrote lukaszg_valve.
A screenshot taken after the fix.Source: Reddit
How does the Steam search engine work?
Players were shocked by the fact that in addition to searches for "Tales of" and itles from this series showing, the list also displayed Sea of Thieves. Here again, a Valve employee stepped in and briefly explained the mechanism of the Steam search engine.
"[...] Granted, Sea of Thieves may not make a lot of sense at first glance. It shows up there because we don't want to restrict the full search results to strictly literal name matches. The search suggestions box already does that. Full search results are meant to be more comprehensive and cover more ground, with maybe sometimes unexpected results - but hopefully less so now than before."
Searching for interesting games on Steam
So, in addition to Valve's efficient solution to the problem, players also became more familiar with the search mechanism used on the platform.
It is worth mentioning at this point theme centers, which will also make it easier for you to search for titles. After all, on the main page of Steam you will find games sorted by a slightly more extensive criterion.
When you click on the category you are interested in, even more titles will appear, which are additionally much more accurately sorted.
