What is Search, Anyway?Steam Search does more than just looking up games; it's a powerful tool that drives many of our discoverability features, including Top Sellers and Specials pages. Today's features are available anywhere the Search tool is used across the store.

Yes, it’s been deprecated. Why? Because too few people were using it to make it worth the time, money, and energy to maintain. In truth, although I sometimes disagree with the operator changes, I happen to agree with this one. Maintaining ALL of the synonyms takes real time and costs us real money. Supporting this operator also increases the complexity of the code base. By dropping support for it we can free up a bunch of resources that can be used for other, more globally powerful changes.