
Apple’s App Store Gets a Smarter Search Engine - timeuser
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/13/app-store-search-just-got-smarter/
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Shank
Using the exact search this article describes, "Get Followers on Twitter" is
the second result on iPad.

If this is the app that Apple considers the second most relevant result, I'm
gonna say the jury is still out on App Store search.

[http://i.imgur.com/5Lca7cw.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/5Lca7cw.jpg)

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grub5000
Searching for tweetbot here (UK) brings up a calculator app second and only 3
results. I expect it's a phased rollout.

~~~
arrrg
You are supposed to search for Twitter as a test. Tweetbot doesn't make much
sense as a search term, at least for finding other Twitter clients. I think
the search results are actually quite great, considering. (The calculator is
an app by the makers of Tweetbot. I actually had that same use case before: I
knew that some developer of some app made some other great app, but I didn't
know its name – so I would search for the app I knew, go to it and then the
dev’s page and then to the app I actually want. So showing other apps of that
same dev in a targeted search for the most popular by far app from that dev
makes total sense to me.)

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jonathankoren
I would argue the calculator is still a fail. If I searched or Tweetbot, the
top hit should obviously be Tweetbot, but I would argue that the other results
should be other Twitter clients. A calculator simply isn't. Even worse, the
3rd result is for a different tapped named "Tweetbot" When you scan through
the results, Calcbot is really the odd one out. Now, if I had searched for
Tapbot (the maker of Tweetbot), then sure, Calcbot makes sense.

Running a search for "tapbots" indeed gives me Tweetbot and Calcbot in the 1
and 2 slots, but the rest of the results are shit. Some competing apps, and of
course "Resturant Fan Logo Quiz" in slot 4 for some reason. (It's in slot 5
for "tweetbot".)

These results are still, not very good beyond position 1. Perhaps Apple should
simply start thresholding results instead of inciting on an infinite scroll of
results.

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anandr2013
The apple music search is also atrocious - that gets a relook as well
hopefully.

I think in general, we (or at least I) have underestimated how good Google is
at search, probably a result of how they have been monopolising talent for the
last several years. This technical superiority (particularly in the machine
learning space) is going to be a huge advantage going forward, as already
evidenced by how much better Google now is than Siri.

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markdown
Now they need to work on OS X search, which is atrocious!

