Some thoughts about the store search page/search bar:
(WARNING: WALL OF TEXT INCOMING!) --- The search function itself needs to be better. It seems to have improved since the site redesign first launched, but there are still things which could be better. A couple off the top of my head:
1) The search engine should not be quite so literal with regards to punctuation: whether you actually type the punctuation which occurs in the name of the game you're searching for (e.g., "King's Bounty: Warriors of the North" -- perhaps not a perfect example, as at the moment, that game does not show up in ANY search results, no matter how you type it =D ) or you fail to type it (e.g., "kings bounty warriors of the north"), it should display the same results.
2) I know in the past that if I were to search for "sid meier", the results would not include all the games that had "Sid Meier's" before the title; I can't tell if this has been fixed or not, because
I can't necessarily trust the search results (and at the moment I'm waaay too lazy to do a domain search on Google to double-check.)
As I said, some such issues seem to have decreased since I first noticed them several months ago, so I applaud you for continuing to hack away at them.
--- The option to filter by price is nearly useless. The "free" option is the one that works as intended most often, I'd say, but only by virtue of the fact that there's normally only a short list of the same free games; however, I know the "discounted" option has, at times, failed to display all of the currently discounted games on the site (I believe the first day or two of the Big Fall Sale, for example), and I wouldn't be surprised if the limited-time free giveaway games similarly failed to show up in searches for free games as well.
Far worse than these issues, though, is the way the "under $20" and "under $10" options work: If I select "under $10", I don't wish to be shown games which are $9.99; yet this is what happens. Same thing with "under $20" and $19.99 games.
This is stupid. This subverts the entire point of including these search options while abiding by the most literal interpretation of how they're labeled. Either change the pricing of products on your site to "round" numbers ($6.00, $10.00, $15.00, $20.00, etc. -- probably not going to happen, and I personally don't care one way or the other), or change these search options to "under $19.99" and "under $9.99". In lieu of that, I guess you could keep how they
work the same, and just re-label them, i.e., "$19.99 & under" and "$9.99 & under", but in that case it would be nice if you'd at least add an option to search for games priced "$5.99 & under".
Best-case scenario: Instead of mutually-exclusive radio buttons for a few options, there would be two radio buttons under the "Price" heading: one with a box where one could enter whatever price one wanted, and it would search all games of that price point or lower (perhaps even with radio buttons to specify X price "and lower"/"and higher"); and the other for "free games [or movies]". "Discounted" could be a check box under the "specify price point" box.
At the very least, there should be an option to search by any of the major price points. It's a drag to have to slog through pages of $9.99 games to find the $5.99 ones mixed in. This is something which has annoyed me about the search page since I first joined GOG.
--- Similar to the idea of being able to specify any specific price point one wants is the theoretical ability to search for games by a user-defined year of release. It's nice that you made the three existing options check boxes instead of radio buttons, but it would be nicer to be able to specify a custom range of years, or to specify a given year "and older"/"and newer".
--- The "Company" search category REALLY needs to be organized in some intelligible fashion, alphabetical being the easiest and most obvious. Perhaps there could also be a box there (like with my theoretical "specify price" box) to specify a known publisher or developer without having to either browse through page after page to find the right one under that heading, or enter it into the main search box (which one might want to use to specify another parameter, such as "FPP" or "point & click".
--- I just noticed today that the option to sort search results "by date added" gives really inaccurate results. There are quite a few games that have been released since I became a member which are shown among some of the oldest games to have been released here, and some are shown much closer to the front of the list than they should be (
Little Big Planet, as far as I remember, was sold on GOG well before it was given away this fall). For example,
Lovely Planet,
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: Collector's Edition Upgrade (not the base game, nor the CE itself, mind you, just the upgrade!) and
Crawl (which is not only not released, but doesn't even
have a release date yet) all appear at the bottom of page 16 of 18 for the whole game catalog, and page 18 is clearly supposed to show the earliest games offered on Good Old Games. Not super important (at least, not to me), just something to look into at some point.
--- DLC titles really should be indexed so that searching "DLC" actually turns up all DLC for all games, not just the couple that have "DLC" as part of their official store page title. (On a somewhat related note, I miss when the URLs of the store pages for most -- if not all -- DLC sold here had "DLC" in them, even when the store page names didn't. It meant you didn't have to visit the page to find out, "Oh, it's just a DLC." Just glance at the URL. =) )
--- This one's
REALLY minor, but, nit-picker that I am, it still annoys me: the sort order option counts as a search filter for some reason, yet the "View" option does not.
Neither one should cause the "Clear filters" command to appear, but currently, having "Order" set to anything other than "by bestselling" causes that command to show up, even if no search parameters have been set. This is harmless, but still odd.
--- Finally (
finally!), the current count of games (or movies) just above the search bar on the search pages should actually change to reflect the number of items the current search parameters returned. This one's so simple, I'm surprised it wasn't implemented ages ago. =)
...And now it is rather late here, so...
I sleep now. (EDIT: ...After some editing for clarification and some attempts at formatting...I sleep...NOW.)
ANOTHER EDIT: More formatting.