We’ve all been there at one point: you’ll try to find a specific app or game on a digital marketplace, and for whatever reason, the search feature doesn’t seem to bring up what you want to download. Whether it’s the App Store or Steam, all digital distribution platforms can sometimes make it challenging to find the exact product you’re searching for in a given situation. With its latest Steam Labs experiment, Valve is trying to make search work better by making tags smarter. 

As Valve points out, one issue with Steam currently is that it doesn’t treat tags like a human being would. Say you want to find a new real-time strategy game to play. In that situation, you may type in “RTS,” thinking that the platform will also pull up games tagged with terms like real-time and strategy. That’s not what happens with the current system. Instead, it treats all tags as separate pieces of information, and so you’ll sometimes get completely different results if you search for a game using different but related terms.