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I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for ublock origin lite “ublock origin lite” For the unquoted search, there are twelve
by tomalpha 1y ago
I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for
ublock origin lite
“ublock origin lite”
For the unquoted search, there are twelve different apps/items returned above it - you really have to scroll down to find it at number 13.
Even for the quoted search, it’s returned in fourth place.
More interestingly the second time I searched with quoted it’s in third place, and the third time of searching the sponsored items at the top is getting even more random.
- Meekro 1y agoWorking fine for me-- when I search under Mac Apps for "ublock origin lite" (no quotes), it appears in 1st place.
- tomalpha 1y agoSorry, 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.
- mort96 1y agoFor 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.
- whstl 1y agoApple is really bad at search, and on purpose. Welp, money before quality!
- cedws 1y agoNah I think they’re just bad at search, macOS Spotlight search has to be the most slow janky search I have ever used.
- DrewADesign 1y agoYou haven’t used windows search recently I take it.
- ffsm8 1y agoEh, as a person then uses both occasionally... I feel like they're pretty on-par? Is the osx search performing so much better on your end? If so, in results or speed? Because for me, both osx and windows searches leave me annoyed anytime I try to use them, it's so bad that I usually prefer to use CLI tools on both platforms ... Or were you just saying it cuz it's funny?
- DrewADesign 1y agoI’m sure there’s some indexing thing I could take care of, but windows edges out spotlight for me for both ineffectiveness and slowness on every machine I use. For me, windows used to be far better than spotlight. It’s strange to me how much better the command line tools do essentially the same job, and that, anecdotally, the GUI ones seem to be getting worse?
- prmoustache 1y agoOn the azure win11 desktop I am using professionally (only windows I use) a large fraction of the time you can't even search anything because the windows menu just freeze.
- ffsm8 1y agoSame for me, But OSX seems to have a similar issue at least on my MacBook Pro M1. I occasionally get the multicolor disk spinner which locks all UI interactions for a few seconds (10-30s) until it unfreezes and works as before again... Haven't been able to figure out the exact cause for it, feels very random.
- asimpletune 1y agoI think it got slow on M1 when AI features came out. I recently disabled them in and trying that out.
- pcdoodle 1y agoI 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....
- e40 1y agoI don’t even see uBO Lite in the iOS App Store. I scrolled pretty far, too.
- mort96 1y agoI just searched for uBlock. Top result is an ad for another ad blocker. Second result is an ad blocker called "Ublock", with "Origin" in its tags; a clear scam whose purpose is to leech off the reputation of uBlock Origin and trick people. Apple's App Store is chock full of scams like this. It's not just bad search, it's a failure to enforce any kind of anti scam policy (combined with seemingly intentionally terrible search).
- vehemenz 1y agoThe 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.
- bsenftner 1y agoWhy do people think a browser extension is safe to use?
- vehemenz 1y agoThe point is that Safari's extension system requires using the App Store, not that it's inherently safer. In some ways, the "App" model that Safari uses could be more unsafe, regardless of Apple's code review. Nonetheless, a critical engagement of software "safety" would require another few thousand words, at least.
- bearl 1y agoSecurity experts.
- jodrellblank 1y agoWhy do people think a browser is safe to use? Why do people think any app is safe to use? Why do people think a website is safe to use? Why do people think an OS is safe to use? Why do people think a driver is safe to use? Why do people think a firmware is safe to use? Why do people think a hardware device is safe to use? Why do people think the chips inside are safe to use? Why do people think an ISP is safe to use? If you have a point to make about it being particularly unsafe or different from any other internet/software trust, make that point. Otherwise you know well enough that there isn't any other option but trust, and people generally trust stuff until given a good reason not to.
- ashurov 1y agodoesn't seem to be available in the Dutch app-store.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoIt 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.
- remus 1y agoNot 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.
- w0m 1y agoif there's a system; people will go out of their way to game it if there's potentially $$$ involved.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
- Doctor_Fegg 1y agoApp Store search takes a while to surface exact-name searches for newly released apps. No idea why.
- lapcat 1y agoApple is generally bad at search. For further evidence, see their developer website. To get anything useful out of it, I have to use a custom Google search: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&udm=14&q=site%3Adeveloper.apple.com+-site%3Aforums.developer.com+{query} https://www.google.com/search?num=100&udm=14&q=site%3Adevelo... Some commenters are presenting a conspiracy theory about how Apple is intentionally sabotaging App Store search, perhaps with the goal of maximizing App Store search ad revenue. I think the empirical evidence, covering all examples of Apple search, points to incompetence rather than malice. Money does factor in, but again, not in a conspiratorial way: rather, Apple simply has no monetary incentive to fix their own incompetence. It's complacency rather than conspiracy. This is what happens with monopolies and duopolies: they've already got essentially a captive audience, so they no longer need to put in the effort to compete. They just "phone it in", so to speak. I don't think that Apple wants a bunch of scams in the App Store. But when developers and users are practically throwing money at Apple, no matter what Apple does or doesn't do, and "services" margins are 70%, there's a great temptation to pocket the profits and shrug. For another example of how Apple is bad at search, look at the Settings app. Awful. But again, it's not sabotage. That would be silly and pointless. It's just pure and simple incompetence and complacency.
- xp84 1y agoI 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.
- 1y ago
- ygritte 1y agoI get shown a fucking ad for Google Chrome when searching for “ublock origin lite” in the iOS app store.
- kaptainscarlet 1y agoSame. 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.
- hoistbypetard 1y agoI tried on the mac store. For the unquoted search, it now comes in 7th for me. If I just search for ublock, I don't see it at all. The mac store has long been bad, but this seems worse.
- coffeecoders 1y agoSearch is bad everywhere these days. Honestly, even Google search with "terms reddit" is better than Reddit's own built-in search. That says a lot. Same deal on may mac. Unless I know the exact file name, Finder search is useless. Spotlight will happily surface a PDF from 2017 before showing the text file you saved yesterday. Which brings me to the question: why is search so hard?
- ymolodtsov 1y agoThis doesn't really make Apple look better, but a huge part of it is surely how recent the Ublock Origin app for iOS is. New apps take time to propagate and become good responses. Which makes sense, you wouldn't want someone else to be able to instantly cover Ublock Origin itself with a copycat app (not that it doesn't happen anyway).
- bigyabai 1y agoSeems like the copycat issue happens regardless: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-impersonating-lastpass-currently-available-in-apple-app-store https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoWhy use an app store. Is Apple more trustworthy than the author of this app. Think about it The company continues to increase its advertising services revenue. In terms of protecting computer buyers from advertising and associated surveillance, one could reason that its interests are conflicted App store "search" has always been a joke. It has never been suitable for app "discovery". The company would rather computer owners select from lists of recommended apps
- MarcusE1W 1y agoWith just ublock origin lite I get it in position 1 one (after one unrelated ad).
- socalgal2 1y agoI needed to add search to my own website. I wanted it to be local search (the titles for the documents are all available locally). I tried several different popular 1000s of stars JavaScript search libraries. All but one failed on simple searches. Like if the title was "See Spot Run to the Park" and my search was "Park" or "Run" this title would not be listed as a result and titles with neither word would appear. I reported the issues, they were ignored as "working as intended". Not sure why anyone uses these libraries. I suspect they don't actually test. The plug them in, it appears to work at a glance, and they ship it. I'm talking about Fuse.js, FlexSearch.js, etc.... I don't remember which other ones I tried but was shocked out bad the results were
- brycewray 1y agoHave you tried Pagefind? https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind https://pagefind.app/ https://pagefind.app/
- socalgal2 1y agono. At a glance it appears to be create an index at site build time. That's not what I needed. I needed to search user document titles (different for every user). Those document titles are synced to local storage. So not a build time thing
- firefax 1y agoDoes anyone have the canonical link and care to share?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]