In a previous post about tagging, I addressed some of the problems inherent in how Match The Memory is currently built, specifically that games aren’t particularly discoverable. At the end of that post, I promised that finding games would be better in a new version of the site that’s coming “soon”.
(Update: The “new version” of the site was released in August 2018, with both search and tags pages being *much* faster than their original implementations.)
Since then, I’ve gone on a holiday game building bender, creating several new Christmas games that I thought would be enjoyable to a broad range of people. But this week, my wife helped me see that adding a bunch of games doesn’t help if people can’t find those games. So I decided to do something about it.
I built a Search page over the weekend that lets you search for any term, and most importantly, shows you the visual preview of the games that it comes back with. It ranks a game higher if it has your search term in the game title or address, and lower if the word is only on a card text or image, or if the game is tagged with the search term. There’s also an extra little bonus for new games and ones that I think are top-notch.
Like the tags page, you can link to a search result, such as this page that shows the search “Christmas”: https://matchthememory.com/search/christmas
This doesn’t fix all of the problems with finding games, and it doesn’t replace the tags function. Rather, the two go hand in hand to help you find the best games that someone else has probably already made.