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Comment by avian | Hacker News Reader

Bad search that tries hard not to actually show you search results is another one of those dark trends I see everywhere.

Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.

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Search on the iOS app store is awful too. You type in the exact name of the app you are looking for and have to scroll through 10-15 vaguely related results before you get to the one you actually want.

I usually get the result I want in the second slot. The first slot is always wrong because it's always an ad.

Ads should never be above perfect matches, this is misleading.

Google Play app store is similar IME; also, it doesn't even let you sort by ratings, like, isn't that the very first thing people want out of a curated store?

It's like Amazon's search, it's ridiculous how bad it is.

A quick glance at these shows Western Capitalism fails to optimise the market and instead optimises profit.

Google's shopping search is definitely not designed to help one shop.

The most irritating thing about App Store search is that the text field doesn’t get focus by default. I hope it’s an unintentional mistake but as it’s never been fixed I have my doubts…

Search on windows is uniquely terrible. Oh, you wanted to launch that app? Let me open Edge with a bing search for that app. I especially love it when I'm trying to launch stellarium and it only suggests "stellarium 200%" unless I delete the "m" from stellarium and then it'll suggest "stellarium", "stellarium 200%" and "stellarium (OpenGL)". Anything else and the only result is "stellarium 200%"

It's total garbage. It's unreliable, sometimes typing out the full name of the app (which kinda defeats the purpose) is the only way to get the app to show in the search results, sometimes NOT typing the full name is the only way to get it to show. Sometimes you get an app, sometimes you get an unrelated app (type is prusa for prusa slicer and you get printers), often times you'll get a random log file with a similar name, or a bing search you certainly don't want.

Hot garbage.

Doesn't the Windows - R shortcut work anymore? This always worked much better than just opening the start menu and typing because it only looks for apps and doesn't try to 'help' you with other random searches. But I don't use Windows so much lately so it could be they removed that also. They seem to do that with everything that's useful.

It does, but it has no autocomplete, or suggestions. You have to type everything completely and perfectly for it to work.

If only it worked like command+space on mac.

Ah that's true but I always type the executable name. E.g. regedit, gpedit, lusrmgr... And it does have a command history that serves as autocomplete as far as I remember, you just have to have used it before.

Spotlight on Mac is indeed far superior. And so is the text launch widget thingy on KDE which I use now.

App stores are rent-seeking middle men. They provide no value over a simple Google search. In fact they seem deliberately worse, given that you almost always get the correct results at the top. Ironic that this applies to Google's Android app store as well. Their only purpose is to extract cash and control what you run on your own devices without providing value.

Meanwhile the only way I can get to advanced search on the web site is searching for "advanced search" in the regular search box.

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