[tomalpha]

I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for

     ublock origin lite
    “ublock origin lite”

For the unquoted search, there are twelve different apps/items returned above it - you really have to scroll down to find it at number 13.

Even for the quoted search, it’s returned in fourth place.

More interestingly the second time I searched with quoted it’s in third place, and the third time of searching the sponsored items at the top is getting even more random.

[zelphirkalt]

It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications. At the very least a 100% substring match should be very visible in the result. If not at the top, then there should be sorting criteria, to make it appear at the top, so that one can sane-ify the search result, when it is not sane.

A good example for bad search is the windows start menu. If you just logged in and the system is still loading (whatever it is doing all that long...) and you press the super key and then start typing, it might be too slow to find things _locally on your disk_, and might start searching online. When you have developed an automatism and just continue typing and then hit enter/return key, you will get some online shit result shown in Edge or some Microsoft store shit, instead of simply launching your already installed app. A critical race right there in the start menu. It's baffling.

Recently, there was a reddit post about a KDE menu search thing just as silly. It would not prioritize the title/name of an app, but instead, after typing 3 or more characters, find a word in the description of a launcher/starter of other apps and show those first, even though the 3 chars or more are a perfect substring of the name of an app.

People reinvent simple search and make silly searches over and over again. One of the main criteria is, that a substring match must lead to being high in the results, if not the top result. Shorter wins vs longer, because the match has higher percentage of match with the full title/name. Beginning of the string matched? Higher in results. All very basic things, that shouldn't be difficult to implement.

[dylan604]

It helps to realize that the search is less of a tool for you to find information and more of a tool to show you an ad targeted on your search query. That's why ads are the top results and the organic data you wanted is after the fold. You're asking an ad company for information, and you don't expect an ad as a result? They are only continuing to show the organic results to tease you into coming back..

[zevon]

The original comment was about Apple's App Store. I assume there are financial ways to get your App "featured" there or something like that but as far as I know, you can't financially take direct influence on whatever logic Apple uses to sort search results there. Yet, it can still be spectacularly difficult to find an App - even if you type in its exact name, as indicated by OP (can confirm from my experience).

If you have a theory about what Apple's motivation to actively serve such bad results could be, I'd be interested to hear it. I've always sort of assumed that the root cause for this is some combination of neglect on Apple's part and attempts at gaming the system by developers (I don't know much about developing for the App Store, but I presume there are forms of SEO-like activities that can be done in attempts to bump up your app).

[dylan604]

Most ad sales platforms have auctions for ad slots and/or keywords. If you want to game the system and have money to burn as growth hacking, you can place a larger value in those auctions/keywords to win a chance at your ad being placed in front of more eyeballs. When it comes to apps/games especially, people will chose whatever is posted from laziness, fomo, or just tired of looking and picking the easy route. I suspect that when you get an unrelated ad to your search, it's because someone else was willing to spend more money for those search terms than someone with more relevant matches. It's always going to be about those Benjamins.

[zevon]

I get that it's always be about money in the end but I understand this sub-thread to be a bit more specific: Is there an ad sales platform run by Apple where your Benjamins have influence on the search ranking in the App Store? I and many other people here are not talking about things that are clearly ads (like a "featured" result or the ads shown by google and other search engines).

[chongli]

The App Store is an ad platform [1]. App developers are bidding on those search keywords.

[1] https://ads.apple.com/app-store/best-practices/keywords

[deanishe]

Is Apple really an ad company?

I think it's reasonable to expect better from them.

[fsflover]

They aim to become one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/19/apple-now-directly-sell...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...

[comprev]

Since Apple take a slice of the App store sale it's in their best interest to "feature" apps which are already popular and bring in good revenue.

Why promote an app with 100 sales over another with 10,000?

[dylan604]

Why do people continue asking this question? Why do people think Apple is not collecting data to serve ads? Do they not remember being asked about it when setting up their devices when the ask if you want to share or not? Have they not seen the privacy options about Apple's ad network? Is it actual ignorance or head in the sand?

[lhamil64]

The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too. It seems like it only searches within the past few days or something, if I try searching for something from a while back it never finds it. And they removed the feature to quickly scroll back to a date in the past, so the only way to dig up old texts is to manually scroll back in a conversation and hope you find it. It's absolutely ridiculous that the search is so bad when it's an app by Google of all companies.

[cptskippy]

> The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too.

It's literally all Google products. They've just simplified and contextualized and added other things over the years such that if you're not searching for something already above the fold then it won't show up.

When I was using Gmail I had an email with important information that I needed about once a year. I knew the exact subject and who it was from but it would never show up in search. It was my only starred email so I could find it on demand.

[tart-lemonade]

Part of the reason I pay for Shortwave is because its basic search is so much better than Gmail's. I don't even use the LLM except for more descriptive searches, which it is also quite good at.

[const_cast]

Thunderbird search is one of the best I've ever seen. Very granular options. Highly recommend.

[cptskippy]

I've managed to divest myself of most Google Apps. At this point I'm only using them for shared docs or calendars.

[const_cast]

I recommend fastmail for calendars. Its pretty convenient, if you host your mail there already. CalDAV is really nice too so you can use your fancy calendar management apps, like thunderbird or outlook.

Shared docs I haven't cracked yet but I haven't needed to. But I hear nextcloud can do it. But that's a whole can of worms.

[Kaytaro]

That's funny because iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface. I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.

[isametry]

Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.

This Reddit post suggests this happened in iOS 13 (so 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d7wemx/underrated_ne...

Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).

Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.

[nofunsir]

I personally sent several scathing emails directly to directors about the issue. I have a long iMessage history and there was a point that just entering a single character in the search field would lock up my mac, let alone my older iPhone.

I have noticed and appreciate the change, so my headcanon is that they actually do read feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[TheDong]

> iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface

And as long as you only want to search all messages, not a single conversation.

Let me give an example: I know a person sent me an image in imessage about one year ago. How do I search "from:user has:attachment date:2024-07-*"?

In gmail that's easy, in discord, that's easy. Does imessage search have literally any of those filters?

Searching within one chat seems especially like it's table-stakes for any chat app's search

[simscitizen]

If you type the name of the person, it should allow you to create a filter for "Messages with: Person". It should also pop up a filter bubble for photos. From there I think you can type in some query and it should do a query on the photos via text. I don't think you can add your date filter though.

Second way would be to open that conversation view, click on the contact icon at the top of the view, which should then bring you to a details page that lists a bunch of metadata and settings about the conversation (e.g. participants, hide alerts, ...). One of the sections shows all photos from that conversation. Browse that until you find the one you care about.

[TheDong]

I admit I was wrong in my understanding of iMessages capabilities.

I remembered its search sucking, and also it not working on all my devices, so I quit using it and regurgitated a stale criticism.

Still, the search is useless to me if I can't do it on my linux desktop (like I can with email, discord, and every other chat service I use), so I'd still say iMessage has a laughably lacking search by nature of it only working on ios/macos, when all other chat apps I use offer at least some search on ios/android/linux

[not_kurt_godel]

> I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.

tfw you're a big tech engineer/PM who does the right thing for your users but get blamed anyway

[jncfhnb]

It’s not mind boggling at all. It’s controlled by one entity that is not optimizing for good search, but rather its own financial gain.

[nemomarx]

What's the entity in question for KDE search?

[ants_everywhere]

KDE search doesn't ignore your search terms like many search engines.

But it also doesn't let you choose which version of emacs is the first result for "emacs" so it has a separate set of problems.

[const_cast]

KDE search is super good, if you're referring to krunner. It searches everything, bookmarks, open tabs, filenames, paths, and even file contents. And it's really fast.

You have to turn the file indexer on or install it if you don't have it. Try `baloo status` or `baloo6 status`. Poke around in setting too so you can index what you need and not temp files.

[dizhn]

The search is pulling from a bunch of sources in a particular order and returning results as it finds them probably. I wouldn't expect it to be anything sinister.

[zeta0134]

Indeed, it's called Plasma Search, available in system settings. Providers can be enabled, disabled, and configured at will. I can't imagine it would be all that difficult to code your own and get it hooked up in there, if you were so inclined. Personally I just unchecked everything except "Applications" and I use it like a quick launcher. Works great for my purposes.

[dizhn]

I use it exactly like that too. It's too jarring to get anything else in the results for me and while I can't imagine why anyone would include any other source, to each their own.

[accrual]

This should disable the start menu web search on Windows 11. It's one of the first .reg tweaks I apply to a new system:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
    "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions"=dword:00000001

[ambicapter]

Ok, this is too good. When I clicked on the App Store link, it opened the App Store and a "What's New" dialog popped up and the only thing highlighted was "Improved Search".

[firefax]

>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications

Not really, if you understand how modern search algorithms work.

Pagerank[1] relies on link analysis -- you see who links to whom, and combine that with information on the traffic each site gets to suss out which sites are more likely to be sought out.

None of that data is available when you're searching through your local hard drive -- you have to use basic search operators like AND, OR, or use negation (Eg: "Star Wars -film" to find information on the space laser thing)

Unfortunately, we don't train folks on how to search anymore, so when "the algorithm" doesn't produce what they are looking for, folks have no ability to conduct their own search.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

[psunavy03]

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

It's sad there needs to be a third-party app for local Windows search, but it works . . .

[TheJoeMan]

I watched an elderly mathematics professor manually type a full URL into the windows search box, complete with "https", and I thought to myself "surely that won't work" and lo and behold...

[KPGv2]

You mean he searched for a URL and received something that was an exact match as his sole result? Sounds like the search worked perfectly.

What do you think should've happened? The search say "I know what you're searching for, but I refuse to help because your dumb ass should've typed this into a web browser address bar?"

This isn't 1995. Computers have access to the Internet, and there's no reason your computer's search bar should only search local.

Now, if he'd had a file with that as its name, and a text document with that URL, I would've expected those first. Maybe not at first. Depends on disk space allocated to indexing.

[TheJoeMan]

I didn’t mean to elicit hostilities, my comment is in the context of the parent comment where they are discussing displeasure with the web search results coming from the Windows search bar. As a more technically literate user, I would prefer for no web results except from my web browser, but I was sharing a corollary to that.

[remus]

Not to stick up for the search in the app store, but I don't think it is necessarily that straightforward, particularly where there is money to be made by gaming the ranking.

[w0m]

if there's a system; people will go out of their way to game it if there's potentially $$$ involved.

[BobaFloutist]

See: companies naming themselves "Aardvark (plumbing, electrician, locksmith, moving) in the day of phone books.

[ygritte]

That's what you get for letting megacorps get away with monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.

[Eggpants]

cool story bruh

[jodrellblank]

Tangent; put lists in alphabetical order! Or some other order which makes sense to the user in the context, like date, or priority. Something which is not unordered, coincidence, whatever the hashtable or nosql DB produced, order of creation when that isn't an important ordering in the domain, some internal or even visible GUID.

Worse if there's no filter, worse if it's a dropdown and there's no way to type the desired name, only look.

[zf00002]

It's like Youtube adding a section of videos you've already watched and have nothing to do with your search, in search results.

[immibis]

In Apple's case we can safely assume it's intentionally like that to make the most money.

[cons0le]

Its great for the app store if people mistakenly download the wrong app. They can increase the total downloads stats for more than one app that way. And it creates more "engagement' with the app store. They don't care that it's "forced" engagement

[hombre_fatal]

Does Apple still allow shamefully antipattern subscriptions like $7/week?

They are so complicit in garbage rebill apps, it's pathetic.

[imzadi]

RoboKiller recently went from like $9.99/mo to $7/week.

[dotcoma]

Why would anyone even add anything called Robokiller ?

What is it supposed to do?

I never pay for anything recurring. Most are scams anyway.

[freedomben]

Seriously, especially when the substring is in the title or filename. Google drive searching is infuriating for that. It will pull up barely related documents to my search term that has the word buried in the content, and not even show the file that has my search term verbatim in the filename or title. If there's one company I expect a really great search experience with, it's Google, and yet it's been this way for years and years...

[yapyap]

It’s not mind boggling, it’s on purpose

[southernplaces7]

>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications.

You mean to say that you think they just somehow forgot to optimize these fundamental things to work well? No.... If the search functionality provided by an otherwise highly capable, ultra-rich tech company is an utter piece of shit, it's intentional. The optimization is elsewhere, while the users are left stuck with a deformed excuse.

[southernplaces7]

Anyone downvoting feel like instead explaining their reasoning? Or just how search can be such utter shit in certain contexts, despite often being developed by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and even fucking Google of all things?

[Belopolye]

People sure love to embody the "leave the multi-billion dollar corporation alone" meme.

[mort96]

I just searched for uBlock. Top result is an ad for another ad blocker. Second result is an ad blocker called "Ublock", with "Origin" in its tags; a clear scam whose purpose is to leech off the reputation of uBlock Origin and trick people.

Apple's App Store is chock full of scams like this. It's not just bad search, it's a failure to enforce any kind of anti scam policy (combined with seemingly intentionally terrible search).

[mns]

But god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app, because they will then reject your update.

[filoleg]

> god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app

I literally have an app installed on my iPhone called “Android TV” (a remote to control android smart TVs, which I used to have years ago), and it says “Connect to Android TV” in giant header typeface on the app homescreen.

Searching for “Android” on app store brings up even more apps containing that word in the name and in the app, including third-party non-Google apps.

[mns]

We have an app for our platform and that app has a news section, we were rejected because we had news about Android devices. We are at this point providing a filtered news list where items with certain keywords are excluded on Apple devices. Maybe it's because of the app category.

[radicaldreamer]

Apple’s App Store makes so much revenue (mainly through the slightly more legit scams like gacha games, but plenty through weekly subscriptions for outright scam apps too) that there are many incentives for that team to never clean this up.

It’s a huge driver of what Apple pushes as the future of the company: services. It has been this way for more than a decade now: "What the hell is this????Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings? Remember our talk bout becoming the 'Nordstroms' of stores in quality of service?“ - Phil Schiller in 2012 (https://www.imore.com/hilarious-phil-schiller-email-reveals-...)

[sneak]

Apple’s contempt for its customers is palpable these days.

It breaks my heart to see how far they’ve fallen.

[cwmoore]

I have not raised expectations since they deleted half of my music collection years ago. To this day they provide no way to export iMessage threads.

[recursive]

Some of us have been palpating it for decades.

[vehemenz]

The problem is that people like us use Homebrew (and tell our families to), so there’s little incentive to complain loudly about this issue. Browser extensions and the occasional one-off app are the only reasons to go there.

[bsenftner]

Why do people think a browser extension is safe to use?

[jodrellblank]

Why do people think a browser is safe to use? Why do people think any app is safe to use? Why do people think a website is safe to use? Why do people think an OS is safe to use? Why do people think a driver is safe to use? Why do people think a firmware is safe to use? Why do people think a hardware device is safe to use? Why do people think the chips inside are safe to use? Why do people think an ISP is safe to use?

If you have a point to make about it being particularly unsafe or different from any other internet/software trust, make that point. Otherwise you know well enough that there isn't any other option but trust, and people generally trust stuff until given a good reason not to.

[vehemenz]

The point is that Safari's extension system requires using the App Store, not that it's inherently safer. In some ways, the "App" model that Safari uses could be more unsafe, regardless of Apple's code review.

Nonetheless, a critical engagement of software "safety" would require another few thousand words, at least.

[bearl]

Security experts.

[bsenftner]

I've always wondered why attorneys do not see these situations as easy money. Corporations really do control the courts...

[whstl]

Apple is really bad at search, and on purpose. Welp, money before quality!

[cedws]

Nah I think they’re just bad at search, macOS Spotlight search has to be the most slow janky search I have ever used.

[mathgeek]

Which I find really sad because at one point OSX had search quality that was really satisfying. That was maybe twenty years ago for me.

[xp84]

Yes. Spotlight search for the Application launcher use-case was close to the speed and quality of LaunchBar (which still works that way of course) when Apple first introduced the command-space shortcut, on vastly slower “oughts” computers. Today it’s much slower and less consistent.

However we know that they could easily do a simple search effectively because Apple’s Launchpad has a perfect app search built in. If you give Launchpad a global shortcut you can press <shortcut>saf<return> and be assured it will instantly open safari every time. Of course, LaunchBar (no affiliation, but I’ve been using it for 22 years) still beats that in every way.

[tim333]

My favourite was back in os7. I didn't really use the file system because you just started typing the name of the file and it came up instantly. I'm not sure why companies have to break simple stuff that works well.

[kergonath]

Spotlight was a revelation in Tiger. I don’t know exactly when it degraded but it’s a damn shame how annoying it’s become.

[hylaride]

MacOS to me started to regress ~2012. I can’t remember what specific release it was, but one major MacOS release around then no longer remembered my MacBook’s external monitor layouts between work and home anymore and it was always “random”.

Spotlight, AirTunes/Airplay, iTunes, etc all also just slowly degraded. It’s like Steve Jobs was personally doing all QA and it just stopped when he died. I remember iTunes genius being SO GOOD that it cost me a fortune in song purchases, but now that apple just gets my monthly music payment, discovering new music is hard again.

[kjkjadksj]

Mojave was a high watermark. 32 bit support still. Relatively polished.

[DrewADesign]

You haven’t used windows search recently I take it.

[ffsm8]

Eh, as a person then uses both occasionally... I feel like they're pretty on-par?

Is the osx search performing so much better on your end? If so, in results or speed? Because for me, both osx and windows searches leave me annoyed anytime I try to use them, it's so bad that I usually prefer to use CLI tools on both platforms ...

Or were you just saying it cuz it's funny?

[prmoustache]

On the azure win11 desktop I am using professionally (only windows I use) a large fraction of the time you can't even search anything because the windows menu just freeze.

[ffsm8]

Same for me, But OSX seems to have a similar issue at least on my MacBook Pro M1.

I occasionally get the multicolor disk spinner which locks all UI interactions for a few seconds (10-30s) until it unfreezes and works as before again...

Haven't been able to figure out the exact cause for it, feels very random.

[DrewADesign]

While it’s clearly not everybody, in my and a number of other users’ personal onedrives, search hasn’t worked since May. Zero results for any search in any context. No response from MS other than essentially “yep! Sorry! Working on it! Promise! In the interim, try just remembering where everything is maybe! lol!”

[DrewADesign]

I’m sure there’s some indexing thing I could take care of, but windows edges out spotlight for me for both ineffectiveness and slowness on every machine I use. For me, windows used to be far better than spotlight. It’s strange to me how much better the command line tools do essentially the same job, and that, anecdotally, the GUI ones seem to be getting worse?

[artursapek]

They definitely are bad at search. When I type “safar” into iOS settings, it says “no results for “safar”” while it looks for the fucking built-in browser’s search page.

[kstrauser]

Weird. I get lots of relevant results with Safari at the top. Which somehow makes it a little worse: I’d naively think we should get identical results.

[pcdoodle]

I can never find my emails on Mac. Even worse if they're organized in folders. I just want a universal search: contains text, sort by age, I don't care about other filters....

[ymolodtsov]

This doesn't really make Apple look better, but a huge part of it is surely how recent the Ublock Origin app for iOS is. New apps take time to propagate and become good responses. Which makes sense, you wouldn't want someone else to be able to instantly cover Ublock Origin itself with a copycat app (not that it doesn't happen anyway).

[bigyabai]

Seems like the copycat issue happens regardless: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...

[coffeecoders]

Search is bad everywhere these days.

Honestly, even Google search with "terms reddit" is better than Reddit's own built-in search. That says a lot.

Same deal on may mac. Unless I know the exact file name, Finder search is useless. Spotlight will happily surface a PDF from 2017 before showing the text file you saved yesterday.

Which brings me to the question: why is search so hard?

[hoistbypetard]

I tried on the mac store.

For the unquoted search, it now comes in 7th for me.

If I just search for ublock, I don't see it at all.

The mac store has long been bad, but this seems worse.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Why use an app store. Is Apple more trustworthy than the author of this app. Think about it

The company continues to increase its advertising services revenue. In terms of protecting computer buyers from advertising and associated surveillance, one could reason that its interests are conflicted

App store "search" has always been a joke. It has never been suitable for app "discovery". The company would rather computer owners select from lists of recommended apps

[e40]

I don’t even see uBO Lite in the iOS App Store. I scrolled pretty far, too.

[Meekro]

Working fine for me-- when I search under Mac Apps for "ublock origin lite" (no quotes), it appears in 1st place.

[mort96]

For me, searching for "uBlock origin lite" (without the quotes) puts it in 3rd place; below AdBlock Pro and an ad for trip(dot)com.

When I search "uBlock origin" it doesn't seem to show up at all.

[tomalpha]

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I too get the same for Mac apps, but for iOS apps still see the same competitor results returned first. For me, that's the same whether I use the App Store from my phone, or laptop.

[socalgal2]

I needed to add search to my own website. I wanted it to be local search (the titles for the documents are all available locally). I tried several different popular 1000s of stars JavaScript search libraries. All but one failed on simple searches. Like if the title was "See Spot Run to the Park" and my search was "Park" or "Run" this title would not be listed as a result and titles with neither word would appear. I reported the issues, they were ignored as "working as intended". Not sure why anyone uses these libraries. I suspect they don't actually test. The plug them in, it appears to work at a glance, and they ship it.

I'm talking about Fuse.js, FlexSearch.js, etc.... I don't remember which other ones I tried but was shocked out bad the results were

[brycewray]

Have you tried Pagefind?

https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind

https://pagefind.app/

[socalgal2]

no. At a glance it appears to be create an index at site build time. That's not what I needed. I needed to search user document titles (different for every user). Those document titles are synced to local storage. So not a build time thing

[ygritte]

I get shown a fucking ad for Google Chrome when searching for “ublock origin lite” in the iOS app store.

[kaptainscarlet]

Same. It never used to show them. It only started recently. But it's only partially letting some ads through. Youtube video ads are still blocked which is good.

[lapcat]

Apple is generally bad at search. For further evidence, see their developer website. To get anything useful out of it, I have to use a custom Google search: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&udm=14&q=site%3Adevelo...

Some commenters are presenting a conspiracy theory about how Apple is intentionally sabotaging App Store search, perhaps with the goal of maximizing App Store search ad revenue. I think the empirical evidence, covering all examples of Apple search, points to incompetence rather than malice. Money does factor in, but again, not in a conspiratorial way: rather, Apple simply has no monetary incentive to fix their own incompetence. It's complacency rather than conspiracy. This is what happens with monopolies and duopolies: they've already got essentially a captive audience, so they no longer need to put in the effort to compete. They just "phone it in", so to speak.

I don't think that Apple wants a bunch of scams in the App Store. But when developers and users are practically throwing money at Apple, no matter what Apple does or doesn't do, and "services" margins are 70%, there's a great temptation to pocket the profits and shrug.

For another example of how Apple is bad at search, look at the Settings app. Awful. But again, it's not sabotage. That would be silly and pointless. It's just pure and simple incompetence and complacency.

[xp84]

I agree fully about how they have proven their incompetence, but let’s imagine you are a PM there and you pitch a feature “Fixing App Store search using well-known strategies and techniques”

I can’t imagine that especially Tim Cook’s Apple is naive enough to not realize that’s going to dent ad revenue, since most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws. So it seems like that project won’t be approved because your boss and their boss are going to know that you’ll be losing Apple a ton of sweet, sweet pure-profit revenue if you succeed. If it would make Apple 100 million dollars in profits to fix it, especially for a neatly encapsulated problem like App Store, where it wouldn’t be that disruptive to just rip and replace the search engine, Apple would just fix it.

All the Mac and iPhone search incompetence, it’d be revenue neutral to fix, and not lend itself to flashy advertising like “liquid glass” does, so that’s why that’ll never happen.

[lapcat]

> most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws.

I wouldn't say it's because of the flaws. It's because of the design: regardless of how well search works, the top hit is always an ad. At best, even with search working perfectly, a search for your own app would return your app as the #2 hit at highest. The search ad system still incentivizes developers to buy ads for searches of their own app, if only as a defensive measure to prevent other developers from inserting their apps at the #1 spot. And Apple makes money, and you pay money, if App Store users click on your own ad for your own app at the #1 spot rather than the "free" search result at the #2 spot.

Oh yeah, and you can't block App Store search ads with an ad blocker. Consider how the App Store is entirely native and has no web-based purchases or downloads.

[xp84]

I hear you, and agree that is true. But consider this angle:

Without buying an ad, but with a competent organic search:

Customer searches "Ublock origin". Results: (This is actually a real life test)

1. (Ad) Adblock Pro for Safari

Note: The rest are actual organic "results"!

2. Brave Browser & Search Engine (WTF?)

3. Ublock: Ad Blocker, Speed Test

4. Firefox Focus: Privacy Browser

5: Same as #1 but organic

6: AdGuard

I gave up trying to find actual Ublock Origin Lite in these results, but I did install it on my phone earlier so it must be in there somewhere.

A working search would have Ublock Origin Lite as #2 after the ad. If I'm Ublock Origin Lite, I might be satisfied with this and trust that anyone who isn't too easily distracted should be able to find me right there above the fold. So I'd be less likely to buy an ad than I am in our real world. #2 isn't as good as #1, but it's good enough for a lot of people. Combine this with not allowing people to infringe trademarks in their keywords or whatever shenanigans is going on above, and the App Store would be a lot less of a scamware cesspool. And boy, do scams pay well!

[suzzer99]

Apple Podcast search never fails to enrage me. There's no way to search within a specific show, just all your followed shows at once. Even if you know the exact episode title, if it has common words in it, you'll get a stream of garbage. It treats any match in the episode description with the same weight as an exact match of the episode title. So I have to go on the web, search the specific podcast to figure out the date, then just scroll to it in Apple Podcasts.

[Doctor_Fegg]

App Store search takes a while to surface exact-name searches for newly released apps. No idea why.

[firefax]

Does anyone have the canonical link and care to share?

[MarcusE1W]

With just

ublock origin lite

I get it in position 1 one (after one unrelated ad).

[ashurov]

doesn't seem to be available in the Dutch app-store.