Although there's no bubble-lettered notice under our logo indicating as much, I still consider GameBump to be in a beta stage. We're still working out the kinks, adding features, and optimizing performance on a daily basis.

Two big features have been added today: a less sucky search engine, and a less-cluttery full-story appearance.

Improved Tag Search

According to my own usage as well as some emailed comments from readers, our old tag search was "incredibly frustrating." Besides being slow, you could only search for one tag at a time. That's fine if you want all stories about the PlayStation 3, but what if you want all reviews for PlayStation 3 games? You had to either browse through all of the reviews for PS3 games or browse through all of the PS3 news for reviews. That's a pain.

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Now you can search for multiple tags appearing in a story. For example, if you wanted to find reviews for PlayStation 3 games you could search:


You can also exclude tags you don't want to appear. If you wanted to find stories about politics that AREN'T about Jack Thompson, you could search:


You can even specify the author of the story for inclusion or exclusion in the search. To see all reviews for Xbox 360 games NOT written by me, just search:


Or to see everything I've written, search:


If you just want to see what headlines will return without having to crawl through all of the stories, you could also use our new Quick Search feature that shows matching stories in headline form in one clean list instead of pages and pages of stories. The linked example shows all PlayStation 3 stories.

Reduced Clutter & Related Stories

When viewing a story in full page/permalink mode, there used to be an unholy mess of "submit to" links and an ambiguous "Read the linked story" that created quite an eyesore.

Now, there's a pretty little "toolbar" that condenses all that information into something visually appealing. When a story has an external URL attached to it, instead of seeing "Read the linked story" you'll see the link's domain and the title of the linked page automatically. Links to submit to Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and Del.icio.us are also a bit more organized and dynamic.

There is also now a "Related Stories" feature on every article that displays up to 8 or so stories marked with some of the same tags as the story you're reading, sorted by age with newest first. Now, you'll always have the latest news relevant to any story right at your fingertips as well as some recent items you may have missed.

Next on the block for upgrades are the member profile pages and perhaps more commenting features.

If you have a suggestion or request for any changes, tweaks, or new features, leave a comment.

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