That’s probably because it is almost impossible to even find things that are not on one of their (pretty arbitrary) top-5 lists, or things that use their paid-for Search Ads.
Their search lacks even basic filtering, which would have been sad after 1 year of store development, much less over a decade.
I had to add my app’s own name to my limited-length list of search keywords because Apple’s default search wasn’t even finding it when searching by name. Pure trash, especially considering their 30% cut and overall bank.
Frankly, much of Apple’s search technology over the years has been terrible so (assuming it’s a competency issue) they should at least consider buying something better. The App Store certainly can’t find things well...I suspect that is “by design” though. Long ago I had to replace Spotlight with Alfred to get good performance on the desktop.
Apple isn’t an ad company, I can’t imagine they’d make a significant amount of money releasing a general search engine just to have one.
Given that the App Store search has one of the worst search algorithms in a major search engine that I know of, I am not holding my breath for an Apple search product...on their hand, when Apple does get something right, they hit it out of the park.
Perhaps Apple internally already consider themselves a search engine. This might only be a temporary misalignment of user experience and data being sent to Apple.
I would like Apple to fix search before they start asking devs to pay for placement. For such a simple data set, their search features are completely non-existent. Search terms look to need to be pretty close to exact, the search results are artificially limited by some mechanism, no ability to search multiple terms, no ability to create custom lists, no ability to filter based on more than their two or three meaningless filters, etc.
I suspect that after nearly a decade of no meaningful enhancements, this is done by design and helps push specific apps up the list in some manner.
Adding paid search capabilities helps no one except Apple and large development companies that can now blow through their marketing budget even quicker. Great for them not so great for Jane Doe's app which suffers under this type of oppressive change.
Yeah, my post was definitely intended in a sort of "it's crazy but it's true" way, because yeah, Apple has gone through insane amounts of engineering effort to create a working search engine that crawls the entire web and does a decent job of selecting top websites, but you can't use it anywhere except in a few chosen UI elements inside iOS/macOS. The whole thing is hidden in plain sight.
Is this bad faith or unbelievable incompetence on Apple's part?
It's tempting to assume the former, but I seriously suspect the latter.
As a user I've seen this happen repeatedly. Search can't find an app even if I enter the name.
This happens for mundane but specialised apps - train timetables, toll payment apps, and other apps for which there is literally no alternative, never mind one that might somehow sell better and make more money.
I don't see how this possibly benefits Apple. Possibly there's some not very effective "optimisation" happening, but it's also possible search is just plain broken.
Search is a dirty business - in the sense that you have to index everything, even the content you don't like, in order to be truly useful (with he common sense exceptions for scummy, abhorrent and/or illegal content).
I could be wrong, but I think Apple might have an ideological problem with a lot of content. It's their call if they decide to filter that stuff out, but it's censorship, and I struggle to see how that would result in a "better" search engine.
EDIT: Applebot still has uses beyond a search engine though. I think Apple are being straightforward in it's explanation. It's for Siri and Spotlight.
The Spotlight search on Mac is horrible and constantly needs to be reindexed. Search on iOS is equally as terrible and frequently doesn't find apps installed on my phone if I search for them by name. And the iOS App Store search consistently is underwhelming. Why??
The Spotlight search on Mac is horrible and constantly needs to be reindexed. Search on iOS is equally as terrible and frequently doesn't find apps installed on my phone if I search for them by name. And the iOS App Store search consistently is underwhelming. Why?
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