Comment by zelphirkalt
7 months ago
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.
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 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).
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.
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Is Apple really an ad company?
I think it's reasonable to expect better from them.
They aim to become one:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Thunderbird search is one of the best I've ever seen. Very granular options. Highly recommend.
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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.
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.
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> 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
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> 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
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.
What's the entity in question for KDE search?
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.
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.
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.
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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:
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...
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.
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.
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.
if there's a system; people will go out of their way to game it if there's potentially $$$ involved.
See: companies naming themselves "Aardvark (plumbing, electrician, locksmith, moving) in the day of phone books.
That's what you get for letting megacorps get away with monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.
cool story bruh
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.
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
Does Apple still allow shamefully antipattern subscriptions like $7/week?
They are so complicit in garbage rebill apps, it's pathetic.
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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.
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?
People sure love to embody the "leave the multi-billion dollar corporation alone" meme.