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[Game Phre|<]

k: Outstanding idea.

I agree that the search shouldn't take up a whole page by itself (too much clutter ). However a drop down menu, or a java menu would work pretty well.

Check out the search feature at best buy Best Buy Simple but effective.

[BeefontheBone]

I think dropdown boxes look neater and more professional - you could have a "search by..." one with things like reviewer, genre and so on, and then another one for the compatibility (since there's only 2 or 3 options for it)

and maybe even one or two for category, depending on how long they'd end up being (which depends on the category) - you could then use the space currently occupied by the genre options on the left-hand side for it since that'd be incorporated.

[mika]

My 2c:

1. Kosta, if you want to build an advanced search (or maybe just improve the current search) check out MySql's Full Text Search Functionality.

2. On the keyword front (or rather themes as underdogs calls them) I think it would be brilliant to standardise on these. What I mean by that is actually have the same themes and make sure all games fall into the same themes as underdogs (and any other abandonware site that wants to participate). It would be much better if games on all the abandonware sites get sorted into the same categories, less confusions and easier to search for. Plus it helps as underdogs already have their games sorted and we could use that data to update our games (at least the ones that are the same).

3. I think it would be best to leave the search box at the top as is (as a quick search) and then have a separate page available from the left-hand menu which would have the advanced search facilities. This is how it's mostly done over the net and I don't see any reason to deviate from the norm (think google).

(Heh, I can just see the developer in me talking from points 2 & 3 )

[Havell]

I don't think a seperate page would be necessary, just a drop-down menu which is set to "Game name" by default. One thing I've noticed about the search box is that searching for part of a game's name yields no results (eg, searching for "Civ" doesn't work), this is kind of irritating and it would be nice if it were fixed so we can search for parts of game's names.

[mika]

Yeah, but you might not remember the name, so you might want to search for it in the body text. Or you might want to list all the games based no WAR. The reason for an advanced search is that you could mix and match certain criteria which you wouldn't be able to do with only one dropdown selection.