Brian put out a new quick search yesterday that has made a lot of improvements in usability and more relevant results based on the input of our admins and approvers. We now feel it's ready for more general testing. You can access it from the quick search page. Right now, the old search is still the default, but you can switch back and forth between them. Please take some time and check it out. We also encourage you to seed us feedback with the provided link on the search page and/or this news thread so we can continue to improve it and make it better. Once we've run it through the hoops, we'll switch the new search to the default and finally phase out the old search.

That's already an incredible improvement along with the additional search options. It's good thing exact strings now show first - searching for GUN actually shows the game titled that way first now.

Feedback (already submitted, just listing to avoid duplicates): I searched for "Goo" and out of the eight games found, World of Goo, which contains the exact word, is shown last, while GOW, an aka for Gears of War, makes that title show up as the third result even though it doesn't even contain that exact word.

I think main title should be sorted before akas. Searching for Doom, I get The Ultimate Doom (aka Doom) before Doom. Or when searching for Half-Life I get Codename Gordon before Half-Life: Opposing Force.

Then searching for Half-Life 2, I get the original Half-Life before Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life 2: Complete. Even odder is searching for Halo, which doesn't return the original Halo at all, yet it returns Halcyon and Aber Hallo!

A suggestion for developers and companies would be to include the latest game they worked on. This would be especially useful when having multiple identical names. Or maybe a year range.

I think what's giving the problem here that in "halo: Combat Evolved" it sees "Halo:" and not "Halo".

I tried searching for Halo: too and it didn't work any better ;)

And I tried some other similar searches where there wasn't a problem.

Brian explained to me why it's not bring up the results the way you think... for the games have have actual long titles... halo is not the whole title

I did a search for Call of Duty... and wondered why ports of call came before some others...

it's because Call of Duty 3 (Special Edition) is such a longer term, than what was searched for that "Ports of Call" appears to be more similiar in the eyes of the database. the search isn't exact word matching, it's breaks down a term into three character sequences and the terms with the most matches shows up first.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigram_search. There might be some way i can give more preference to terms that also match entire words.

That'd be awesome!

I noticed that too. from the databases stand point "halo: combat evolved" and "halo" aren't close enough to be considered similar. i don't know the best way to make this work without having a bunch of other searches through stuff in that we don't want. obviously adding an aka as 'halo' to the game would fix the problem, but not sure the admins want to do that.

I changed the sorting so exact word matches are favored more. Goo should shows first now. The freespace and call of duty examples others mentioned are ordered better now too.

Very cool.

One issue: searching for "Ultima" in game groups does not find the Ultima Underworld series nor the Worlds of Ultima series. For the latter, "worlds" also doesn't work.

That's cool indeed, searching for D returns the exact game as the first result.

And "Z" finds "Z" :), but not "Z: Steel Soldiers" :(

I was very excited by that, it's a great improvement over the previous search system. Excellent work!

One question I have is how it treats numeric sequels, as searching for Avernum brings up the games in the following order: Avernum, Avernum 2, Avernum 5, Avernum 3, Avernum 4.

Got this error message:


It happens when searching for 3D Engine then switching between games and game groups before it's finished loading.

Very cool improvement of the site.

When I search for "quake", I get "Quake III: Arena (a.k.a. quake 3)" as third result, however I don't know why the aka is in lowercase, as it has a capital on the game's page.

The same is true when searching for "Phantom Brave: We Meet Again"

Excellent work, entries appear in an order I'd expect now ;-)

The only thing I'm missing from the old search page is the separation of the different categories (games, companies, attributes etc.) - now my brain has to filter the entries I don't want to see, as unchecking the boxes for the irrelevant categories would take even longer. But that's just my opinion...

Edit: When searching for "software" (goal: finding the game "Software Tycoon") I obviously had to disable the box in front of "Companies". Sometimes (I wasn't able to reliably reproduce this) unchecking the box is ignored - the check has gone, but I still see the companies in the result list. Additionally the search doesn't find the title, only when searching for "software tycoon" the game is found.

When I searched for Tomb Raider, the GBC game still came up first. But other than that, it's a much better improvement.

This is great, far more accurate than the previous search.

Here's a thing I noticed while messing around with numbered entries: searching for the phrase "nhl 6" returns NHL 98 first, then NHL 2k, and only third NHL 06. Also searching for "nhl 9" returns the 90's games first, then NHL 09. In the latter case it's understandable, but the former is just weird.

Would it be possible to add an hyperlink to the platform ?

So far, it's working quite well. I'm using it at the store, and it returns quick searches far better than the old one.

The : fiasco is still in effect.

I searched for "franko", and Franko: The Crazy Revenge wasn't among the results.

Worked for me.

Well, it didn't for *me*, and I'm much more important than some ol' boring you :(

EDIT: The forum search engine seems to be nonworking...

Searching for "board does not return the "board games translations" group.

The only thing I've thought of that would be nice is if clicking on the name of a category (as opposed to the checkbox) would limit the search to that category rather than exclude it. Often I want to search for only companies or developers, and that would save a few clicks. :) All my other issues have already been pointed out.

+1

Great idea to have the separation from the old search back, I totally support it :-)

Nice. Clearly from the posts with issues it's not perfect, but my first test search for Super Mario Bros. turned out so much better.

OLD
1. Super Mario World - SNES
2. Super Mario World - Wii
3. Super Mario Bros. - Wii
4. Super Mario Bros. - NES
5. Super Mario Bros. - GBA
6. Super Mario Bros. 3 - GBA
7. Super Mario Bros. 3 - NES
8. Super Mario Bros. 3 - Wii
9. Super Mario Bros. 2 (the American one) - Wii
10. Super Mario Bros. 2 (the American one) - NES

NEW
1. Super Mario Bros. - GBA/NES/Wii
2. Super Mario Bros. 2 (the Japanese one) - GBA/NES/Wii
3. Super Mario Bros. 3 - GBA/NES/Wii
4. Super Mario Bros. 2 (the American one) - NES/Wii
5. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe - GBC
6. Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt - NES
7. Super Mario World - SNES/Wii
8. New Super Mario Bros. - DS
9. Mario Pinball Land - GBA
10. Super Mario 64 - N64/Wii

Thank you so much, Brian.

New search is very nice and i just noticed a month old update (Large screenshots are now scaled down).

These are big usability improvements.

When I search for "Outcast", I get four versions of "Jedi Knight II: Outcast" before "Outcast" then another version of Jedi Knight II followed by Outcast for spectrum and the limited edition of Outcast. Searching for "nomad" shows two versions of "Omikron: The Nomad Soul" before "Nomad" and searching for "Stars" brings up a lot of Star Wars games before showing any games with the word Stars in the title.

All of those works fine for me. Sure you don't still use the old search?

D'oh! Yes, I was using the old search, sorry.

Searching for "Barrow" of "Barrow Hill" turns up the first game, but not the Limited Edition. Only when I add "Limited" to the search it finds it.

Checked it out today and searched for the game I could never find in the old search, the game "N", and I am very pleased to announce that it was in the top 3 games (compared to not been in the top 200 game via the old search).

But the platform drop-down seems rather useless now as it searchers for only games within those platforms but yet all the developers and game groups still get listed. In my opinion ether search the game groups and developers that have a game with in that platform or change the list to just have the options in the tick boxes (people, game groups etc.) so the user can summarize the search before searching.

Overall very good job.

Okay, seriously, this makes no sense!

• If I try searching for "Franko" or "Franko:" Franko: The Crazy Revenge does NOT appear among the results.
• However, if I search for "Franko Revenge", "Franko Crazy", or even "Franko The", then Franko: The Crazy Revenge appears at the first position!
• If I try searching for "Crazy" or "The", Franko: The Crazy Revenge does NOT appear among the results.
• If I try searching for "Revenge", it WILL appear.

What the hell?!?!?!?!

EDIT: Also, a search for "o.d.t." failed to bring up O.D.T. - Escape... Or Die Trying.

Searching for FES does not turn up Persona 3 FES Searching for Persona does not turn up Persona 3 FES (Persona 3 works, though.)

lego indiana jones gives different results than indiana jones lego

Searching for allied gives the games All and Aliens3, but does not give Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

In general, I want the search results to include all games that include the terms in question.

Please let us go right to a specific platform from the search page.

It seems that the beta search does not find titles or esp. companies if the name contains more than one word and you only enter one of them or the first one (e.g. "Trinode" doesn't work, but "Trinode Entertainment" will show "TriNodE Entertainment Systems").

Yeah, strange. Try searching for this game with a single word. :o)