Comment by QuantumNomad_
16 hours ago
I tried to search for Friendster in the App Store and didn’t see it among the first few results. Instead, App Store was returning a sponsored ad followed by normal results for all other kinds of similar annd less similar apps. Instagram, Snapchat, Yubo (never heard of), Monopoly Go (mobile game related to the board game Monopoly), BeFriend (never heard of), Tinder, Friendly Social Browser (never heard of), Facebook, and at that point I stopped scrolling the results.
For a moment I thought maybe the app was US exclusive or something and not available in my region.
But following the link from the post worked fine and I could install it.
I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
Anyway, installed the app finally thanks to the link.
When a new app is released, it takes a few days for it to get into search, for some reason. Pretty much every single time a new app releases I see a comment like this. Nothing malicious you just have to wait a bit.
> Nothing malicious
The first result is a sponsored result, and even after Friendster is indexed, if they don't pay apple's extortion-rate, the first result will still be for some other social media app.
Ads in the app store are malicious. There are people who have searched "Ledger bitcoin wallet", clicked the first link (a malicious app who paid apple enough money to be 'sponsored' for that search), and had all their money stolen.
Well they are domain squatters so they known how this extortion business works.
I think it's a warranted attitude to take a failure to implement plaintext search as part of your text search algorithm as enemy action. Yesterday I ended up at Bing for some reason and typed in the unique name of the site I was looking for and it didn't even come up in the first page; All their competitors did, as well as a couple random SEO farms. This is enshittification to the point of unusability, for an application space that we solved in the mid 90's.
My workplace does this to our customers too, where you get worse-than-plaintext-search effectiveness, and I guess it must be profitable enough conning the customer to waste our time as well, as we use the same interface for a lot of customer questions.
We need a FOSS nonprofit search engine that works like 2000s google
Agreed.
You can search apps by their exact name, identifier, anything, and App Store will not find them for day+.
Bookmarking this for the next time somebody claims Apple makes great software.
4 replies →
Odd, Friendster was the first non-sponsored result for me in the U.S. store.
> I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
App Store search is fucked. Hilariously, Apple is at least non-discriminatory - try searching for any Apple app, and they will also be (at best) in the second slot after "sponsored" crap.