New homepage!

For a long time we wanted to create a new Steam 250 homepage with a dashboard interface to give a clear overview of many of the rankings on offer. Until now, the homepage was our signature Top 250 ranking only, but I think this dashboard interface should be more valuable for helping new users discover more of the site.

I haven't achieved as much as hoped this month since being diagnosed with sleep apnoea. During the week I felt good, I banged out the new home page working non-stop, but the rest of this month has been a difficult time for me. I'm on a rapid weight loss diet that's working so I hope this will all blow over in a couple of months.

Looking forward, the next goal is both improving search and improving the Club 250 updates. Club 250 is still updated manually and wastes too much of my time pressing the same buttons every day to keep the data from becoming stale. A new AI will be developed to keep it updated automatically, assessing what needs updating and how often based on collected heuristics. All of this will happen behind the scenes so it's a non-glamorous update but very necessary nonetheless.

But the search is the thing you care about. The search is a large undertaking and multi-faceted project. It is primarily split into two parts: one is the game name search with auto-complete suggestions, like the search bar on the Steam store. It will show a list of games with titles matching, or closely matching, the search terms entered. The second is an advanced search that lets you search by multiple diverse criteria like tags (included and excluded), dates, price, review score, categories, features and other metadata. The results of an advanced search would be a games ranking designed according to your search criteria that can be shared with others and further refined using our various ranking algorithms and weighting value that you define. That should be fun!