Every article tag can be clicked to get a list of all articles in that category. Every article tag also has an RSS feed! You can customize an RSS feed too!
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Valve make some needed improvements to the Steam Search

By - | Views: 16,370

After testing out a bunch of changes to the way Steam Search works in a Steam Labs experiment, Valve has now rolled it out for everyone with new features.

Steam Labs is the area of Steam where they experiment more, let people opt into new features and they also pull in outside developers to do some prototypes. This expanded Steam Search is one of such experiments. Valve said the improvements to it started as "an exploration of new ranking algorithms, but based upon user feedback it expanded to include the many quality of life improvements in today's release".

Now there's some new (and quite useful) filters, that somewhat amazingly weren't there before. You can now filter by price and special offer, include/exclude by tags, hide games in the search you know of but don't want or already own, exclude them based on features—so if you don't want to see VR you don't have to.

There's also infinite scroll (which you can turn off in your preferences) and they're planning to continue tweaking Steam Search to make it more useful. This is an excellent start though.

Valve have really awoken in the last year or two, so many improvements have been made. It felt like they were a bit of a sleeping giant before. Nice to see what some competition can push them to do.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Steam, Valve
20 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
3 comments

Eike Feb 26, 2020
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Search is (for ages) broken for me in the Steam app on mobile. When i e.g. enter "hidden", it shows three games with the word in the title as popup. But when I do not choose one of those but press "search" instead, it shows the search filter "hiddden" on top - but the game list does not change, the first one still is CS:GO for example.


Last edited by Eike on 26 February 2020 at 11:00 am UTC
Schattenspiegel Feb 26, 2020
That is the one lab feature I have been waiting for. Not sure what took them so long ;-)
RanceJustice Feb 27, 2020
This is certainly another step in the right direction and I'll have to take some time to test out the newer features.

I do wish they'd give some attention to Wishlisting though, which I feel is in more dire need of modernization; specifically, multiple Wishlists with user-defined titles, as well as both user/community and official tags/attributes. Right now I have a 200+ entry Wishlist, with varying different reasons for any given title to be upon it, which is frankly a mess. If implemented correctly this could have significant benefits for Linux, if publishers/devs could see many Steam users had their game on a Wishlist with a "Waiting for native Linux support is promised/released etc" or "Waiting until compatibility with Proton improves", among others.

Regardless, it is nice with this Search update / QOL to see Steam continuing to iterate upon new features that better the experience for the users ; a sharp contrast to many of the other storefronts/platforms/launchers that seem to operate as a fiefdom predicated on exclusivity and minimal actual features/improvements.
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.