Forums > Site Announcements > Google Custom Search has arrived on the site

I already posted about Disqus being added to the site, but I thought I'd also mention that I'm testing out Google custom search again.

This time, I'm paying an actual fee for a year's use of the service. In the past, it didn't work well because so much of the site wasn't indexed in Google, but that's no longer the case. The vast majority of game profiles, reviews, and news articles now show on Google and will come up in the search, to the point where Google is finally--as it should have been a long time ago--a better way to search the site than what I had coded.

If you search for a game title now, you'll find the most relevant results immediately. You'll see reviews and samples right on the results page, and you should also see related content that you might not have known existed. In other words, search has effectively been overhauled.

With my custom search engine, there were a number of games that wouldn't show up if you searched for them, even though they were in the database. There were problems that I couldn't fix with a number of the Assassin's Creed games, for instance. So while Google still isn't a perfect solution, I believe that it will be superior to the old option while encouraging casual users and community veterans alike to more fully explore the content that we have all produced together.

I hope that you'll let me know how the new search system works for you. It's not perfect yet and I may still be able to do some revision that improves it a bit, but so far I like what I'm seeing and hopefully you will too!

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2