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..

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.

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.

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

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".

>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

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

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

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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...

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

>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.

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

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-...)

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

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

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.

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

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

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....

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

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.

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.

Have you tried Pagefind?

https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind

https://pagefind.app/

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.

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.

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.