u/AccomplishedEvent273

Hey everyone, I built indiedex.gg which is a search engine and recommendation engine to find steam games that normally don't surface on the steam store.

The way it works is that I consume all steam data, and enrich the data with social signals about each game and game studio. Then I do some data processes to make really good similarity and game suggestions.

Each game becomes a game details page and a games-like page, and each page supports 4 languages, currently my catalog size is 120k, so 120K * 2 pages * 4 languages = 960K pages.

However each page does provide unique value, which is the programmatic analysis of the game based on my data processing. For example, the game detail page will show this section:

https://preview.redd.it/z06cox432euh1.png?width=922&format=png&auto=webp&s=48cc0498ea89f07ffb294a5bf318990d8316a652

which is unique per game, and based on not only the data from social signals but also my system's generated tags for each game.

https://preview.redd.it/no3q22ca2euh1.png?width=1568&format=png&auto=webp&s=4da31708da1cccf065de90abfd2f23d4efab042a

and the games-like page does something similar but based on similarity signals and its own similarity analysis.

I understand google is cracking down on scaled content that it considers "not helpful", however, based on feedback from users and engagement data (average sessions are around 50 seconds, viewers visit 3.5 pages on average) I know the app is helpful and the people that love it, really love it.

I have seen a lot of different interpretations of what Google means when they say "scaled" and "helpful", but I don't really know what to expect here, this is the GSC chart, I launched this site on early August, and it seems the latest update resulted in a spike:

https://preview.redd.it/6hgfnoqa3euh1.png?width=2959&format=png&auto=webp&s=d1071959c9ffac7f5b1a2b980aa56ad26897e94e

I know some SEO, but I am not yet an expert, based on your experience, should I be shitting bricks and expecting Google to decide it is my time and then have it kill my site purely based on the fact that I generate pages programmatically?

EDIT:

A bit more information if it helps:

This is how many pages are indexed

https://preview.redd.it/2mi3baoi7euh1.png?width=1216&format=png&auto=webp&s=06c3fe1ae8e6e433ca6f3b75ae4cf85ca0185154

And the sitemap was submitted with ~21K pages

https://preview.redd.it/q59hqsjq7euh1.png?width=1152&format=png&auto=webp&s=6dd1841825b97d8a93a0c7adf147b2ef7258823a

Hey y'all,

For the last few months I've been chipping away at something for Texas swimming: a single place to see the named holes, springs, and falls, whether you need a reservation, what it costs, and if it's actually open.

I finally got it live and wanted to share. It's called swimholesmap.com, and the point is simple. Hill Country swimming is a maze of state parks, city pools, and private springs. Figuring out if Hamilton Pool needs a booking, if Jacob's Well is swimming or just looking, or what Barton Springs costs usually means five tabs and a Facebook rumor.

Here's what it covers:

• 12 named swimming holes, 4 hot springs, and 4 waterfalls on record
• An interactive map of all of them
• For each spot: access, fee, whether you need a reservation, and any closure or hazard note on file
• The swimming-holes list is at swimholesmap.com/tx/swimming-holes, including Hamilton Pool, Hippie Hollow, Krause Springs, Blue Hole, Devil's Waterhole, Garner / Frio, and Blanco State Park
• Hot springs (Barton Springs, Balmorhea, Comal, San Marcos) and waterfalls (Gorman, McKinney, Pedernales, Caprock) are on the same hub

I started building this because I kept getting burned showing up to a hole that was reservation-only, bacteria-closed, or not swimming at all. So I built the thing I wanted to exist.

It's just me working on this on the side, no team.

Would love for you to poke around and tell me what's missing or wrong. This is the named, documented set, not every limestone pool on Barton Creek. If there's a public hole near you that should be on here, I'm all ears.

Let me know if you have anything you would like to be added!

Hey y'all,

For the last few months I've been chipping away at something for New Mexico: a single place to see how full the reservoirs actually are, not a screenshot of someone else's dashboard from last week.

I finally got it live and wanted to share. It's called reservoirfinder, and the point is simple. Figuring out if Elephant Butte is a puddle, if Navajo is usable, or if Ute is in good shape usually means bouncing between USGS, Reclamation, and a state park page.

Here's what it covers:

• 10 reservoirs in New Mexico with a current level reading
• Percent of full pool for each, averaging 25.3% as of September 28, 2026
• The spread is wild: Lake Maloya at 92.1%, Ute at 81.5%, Navajo Lake at 46.7%, Eagle Nest at 25.5%, Bluewater at 7.8%, Elephant Butte at 1.9%
• A map of all of them, filterable by operator
• For each reservoir: the current reading against full pool, a history chart, who runs the dam, and the date of the reading

I started building this because I kept getting burned trying to figure out on the fly whether a lake was actually fishable or if the ramps were sitting in dirt. So I built the thing I wanted to exist.

It's just me working on this on the side, no team.

Would love for you to poke around and tell me what's missing or wrong. Conchas, Cochiti, Abiquiu, Heron, El Vado, and Caballo are not on this list yet. If those are the ones you check, I want them next.

Let me know if you have anything you would like to be added!

Hey!

I created indiedex.gg it is a search engine that you can search with natural language and it has the ability to find a lot of hidden gems that you might not have heard of.

Each game page also has a "games like" link that shows the games like the one you are seeing so if you find something you like, you will probably find a lot more!

Here is a search I tried out: https://www.indiedex.gg/search?q=space+games+with+large+scale+economies

I'm a big fan of X4:foundations, so I can also go to that game's page and find others like it, however some games like X4 are pretty unique and the matches might not be strong as sometimes there is just nothing really like it out there.

Try it out, let me know what you think :)

I built indiedex.gg, a hidden-gems game search engine on steam data. Search is the front door: type something like “a game like Hades that feels cozier and is co-op,” and it should actually understand that mix of reference + vibe + filters.

Those compound queries used to go through a DeepSeek extraction call that turned the sentence into structured pieces (reference game, filters, tags, vibe). It worked, but it was slow and expensive on the hot path.

I swapped that step to TypeSafe Jev on OpenRouter’s Decisions API. Jev doesn’t write a free-form answer. It answers a fixed set of closed questions in parallel (yes/no odds, choices), and I compose that with my existing regex helpers into the same extraction shape I already had. Same search pipeline after that, just much faster routing.

Bakeoff on 50 cases:

Metric	DeepSeek	Jev
Extract p50	~1.5s	~130ms
Full route p50	2871ms	1256ms
Weird title-resolve	96-100%	100%
Hard-filter agree	n/a	100%
Weird top-N overlap	n/a	100%
Cost (fixture)	~$0.014	~$0.0025
So extract got roughly 10× faster, end-to-end route roughly halved, cost dropped a lot (around 6x), and quality held on my fixture set.

If you’ve been building “NL in → structured intent out → tools do the work” instead of a chatbot, this pattern felt like a better fit than another chat completion.

I think models like Jev will open the doors to a lot of cool UX features, decision engines, smart filtering, auto moderation and different ways to interface with apps and machines.

Happy to answer questions about the hybrid setup.

Hey y'all,

For a while I’ve been building something for people who actually care what the reservoirs are doing: current water level against full pool, in plain terms, without hunting through USGS / Reclamation pages. I finally got the Lake Mead page live and wanted to share it: https://reservoirfinder.com/nv/lake-mead The point is simple. Lake Mead is the one everyone asks about around here, but “how full is it?” usually means piecing together an elevation number, full pool, and whether it’s up or down from last week. This puts it on one page.

Here’s what it covers:

• Current level as % of full pool (right now ~24.2%), elevation, full pool, and as-of date
• Week-over-week trend and same-date-last-year comparison
• Chart of storage since 2010 (1Y / 5Y / full range)
• Dam facts (Hoover Dam, operator, uses)
• Visiting / fees / amenities, swimming notes, nearby campgrounds, map + directions

I started building stuff like this because I kept bouncing between agency sites just to answer “is it higher or lower than last year?” So I built the thing I wanted to exist. It’s just me working on this on the side, no team. Same network as the Nevada public lands directory if you’ve seen that. Would love for you to poke around and tell me what’s missing or wrong. If the reading looks off, or there’s a feature you wish it had (other NV reservoirs are already on the site too), I’m all ears. I’m planning on expanding to more states and keeping levels updated. Let me know if you have anything you’d like added.

That didn't age well

indiedex.gg

Any feedback is much appreciated, got 11 users so far and I’m testing different messaging to see what resonates with the community, there are a few competitors in the space and I know it has a market, it’s been hard to figure out how to reach the audience and convert from cold.

It favors indie games, but you can find any game that has released. You can search by mood/feel, or you can also look for similar games to the ones you already like

Hey r/SideProject , I'm Nico, the solo builder behind indiedex.gg, a search engine built on top of the Steam catalog.

How this started

It began as a side project messing with Steam's API for some data science practice (their API is generous, way more than I expected). One thing turned into another, and a data experiment slowly became a full search engine.

The problem I was trying to solve

Steam's front page has gotten noisier: more spammy shovelware clogging discovery and the same games getting the spotlight all the time because they sell well. And it's not really Steam's fault: they can only surface so much risk. Their incentive is to lean on games that are already popular because that's what reliably sells. That means a lot of genuinely good, smaller games never get seen.

So I built two things to fix that for myself:

• A spam filter based on activity and abandonment signals (still tuning it, but it's already cutting a lot of the noise)
• A demotion system that actively pushes AAA/already-popular titles down the rankings so smaller games get a shot at being seen

What else is in there

• Semantic search + recommendations: the actual data science part that got me into this in the first place
• Lists + backlog management: I have 5,000+ games in my library and zero idea what to play. Categories were too annoying to maintain, so lists support bulk actions, and the backlog has its own ordering separate from regular lists
• Taste-matching / friend finder: matches people with similar taste. Right now it's based on lists, but I'm moving it toward games you've actually completed and reviewed, plus the tone/personality of how you review, haven't seen that done before. Still early, no real user base in it yet, so it needs time to calibrate
• Weird query button: pre-set, pre-calculated queries you can riff on with genres/preferences you like (also cheaper for me to run than live queries)
• Indie dev tools: a "games like" page and a challenge page so devs have somewhere to point people instead of dropping raw Steam links, plus a way to personalize the pitch

How I actually use it

1. Add a few games I already like to a themed list
2. Check the "Games Like" / recommendations tab for that list (recommendations are per-list, not per-profile, so you can build your own mix)
3. Look at the signals on games I like and add those to the search to narrow things down. Some are pretty funny (Overwatch's signals made me laugh), and yes, you can still search for stuff like "shooters with technical issues" if that's your thing

Business model

It's free, and I'm funding it out of my own paycheck for now, not a scalable plan, but low-capital-intensive by design so it doesn't need to be. There's an optional supporter membership if people want to help keep it free for everyone else and it unlocks some extra features like the friend finder (taste twins and taste profiles).

What's next

A mobile app, plus notifications when new releases match your taste. Ingesting prices across every country/game currently takes about a month, so if anyone from Steam wants to bump my API rate limits, I will not say no.

And of course, user acquisition. I started by making some articles with all the data I have and hosting it here https://www.indiedex.gg/news , then using that to create posts that drive discussion, I just got started doing it this morning and got 1 free sign-up from someone that wandered into the homepage and got interested in the backlog management feature.

AMA

Happy to answer anything: building a niche search/recommendation engine solo, working with Steam's API, spam/ranking signals, semantic search, why I built taste-matching around review tone instead of just lists, or just general "how do you scope a one-person SaaS" stuff. Fire away.

Source: indiedex.gg

I made a study of 120K steam listings and categorized indies to have a better look at how indie developers behave after launch, I see that most posts related to game marketing in general are hyper focused on wishlists.

Wishlists is where people get the early dopamine hit and all the launch excitement, but that's not where brand equity gets built. 77% of indie studios with a dated Steam release have shipped exactly one game, and multi-game studios show meaningfully higher median reviews per title (9 → 14 → 18 going from one game to three-to-five). Launch goodwill only compounds if something's left running for it to land on, a community, a next project, or both.

No Man's Sky is the clearest counterexample: 2025's Worlds update pulled a concurrent peak (~111k) close to the 2018 NEXT resurgence, years after the original launch spike. That's what post-launch actually staying in the game looks like.

Full data study with interactive charts (plus the honest caveat that "ship a sequel" isn't an auto-win) is up on this article indiedex.gg

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EDIT: I'm using NMS as an example, not saying "just be like them", NMS is a good example of a studio with a single project that developed it for over a decade and used that single project to build brand equity. The article and post are about highlighting that there is more than the wishlists to think about and plan for.

Made a website for discovering indie games and I've been leaning into an arcade/CRT terminal look, phosphor green and amber on near-black, VT323 and Press Start 2P for the type, subtle scanlines/vignette so it feels like glass without hurting legibility, and then one colder neon (cyan/violet) reserved for a single "surprise me" button so it actually pulls your eye instead of competing with the green/amber everywhere else. Would love critique on whether that restraint reads as intentional or just feels inconsistent, does it feel like too much? Here's the live site: indiedex.gg

Homepage

Backlog Management Screen

Search Empty State

Search Loading State with Scrolling Terminal

Search results

Game details page

Made a website for discovering indie games and I've been leaning into an arcade/CRT terminal look, phosphor green and amber on near-black, VT323 and Press Start 2P for the type, subtle scanlines/vignette so it feels like glass without hurting legibility, and then one colder neon (cyan/violet) reserved for a single "surprise me" button so it actually pulls your eye instead of competing with the green/amber everywhere else. Would love critique on whether that restraint reads as intentional or just feels inconsistent, does it feel like too much? Here's the live site: indiedex.gg

This is the homepage

Backlog management screen

Search page without results

Search page loading state is a terminal that shows log scrolling up like a PC terminal

Search with results

Game details page