Apple needs to go a long way before it thinks about launching its own search engine. Smartphones? Sure. Tablets? Absolutely. Search? Fuggetaboutit!
As much as we all love Apple, nobody can deny that its search products are oddly bargain basement in quality. iTunes discovery is horrible, the App Store is abysmal and Siri’s painful.
Could Apple fix it? Sure it could, but it’s going to take a lot more than one poor new employee to do it. Here are the worst offenders when it comes to all things Apple Search:
Photo: Apple
Siri
Siri was originally conceived inside Apple as something called a “do engine.” Today, the only thing it does is drive you mad. Even Microsoft is mocking Siri these days.
Based on patents, Apple clearly plans on Siri being the center of a new kind of digital hub — just as the Mac was in previous years — but the service must get a whole lot better before it can do that. Siri was one of the last projects Steve Jobs was actively involved with at Apple. Getting it right should therefore be a tribute to one of tech’s craziest perfectionists.
iOS App Store
The App Store is an astonishingly huge moneymaker for both Apple and developers. With that said, even the most ardent Apple fan would admit that its discovery system is dismal. An increasing focus on live curation certainly helps, but as the App Store grows well beyond 1 million apps, Apple needs to find a way of more intuitively allowing customers to find what they’re looking for.
If that got sorted, Apple wouldn’t need to worry so much about developers pouring money into gaming the system to get their apps higher in the App Store rankings.
Spotlight Search
Spotlight Search has been around for ages, but it got a big boost for OS X Yosemite, when it was given a complete makeover — along with the ability to search Wikipedia, Maps and a variety of other sources. Spotlight is certainly a step in the right direction, although it’s still not without its faults.
It performs significantly worse than third-party app Alfred, and Spotlight’s top hit rarely turns out to be what I’m actually looking for. It’s disappointing because — with its dive into online search — Spotlight could be a tool to replace my need to ever visit a search engine like Google. Instead, it’s a half-finished feature that gathers virtual dust on my iMac desktop.
Apple Support Communities
The search function on Apple Support Communities is better than everything else on this list — but that’s likely because it has so much less to sift through. Every message fits the same broad template, and there’s nowhere close to the mass of information a tool like Siri must navigate.
Still, it manages to just be “meh.”
Apple’s fortunate enough to have one of the most passionate fan bases of any tech company ever (granted, a lot of that’s the result of 40 years of hard work!). The Apple Support Community is a fantastic resource, which content-wise is a reminder of the kind of collaborative help tool you’ve always dreamed the Web could be. So why isn’t it as easy to use as Apple’s other technology?
If you’re visiting Apple’s support pages, chances are you’ve got a problem you’d like to fix. You don’t need lame search results to add another problem to what is (likely) already a bad day.
Do you think this is an unfair panning of services that aren’t as bad as I’m making out? Or are there other search-related areas you’d like to see Apple work on? Leave your comments below, where we won’t have to hunt for them.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
11 responses to “Apple is getting into search? Pleeease”
Nice write-up! I’d like to see them fix two things–and both relating to text size!
iTunes reviews are impossible to read– they’re in a tiny font and there’s no way of resizing them to be legible. (Doing a screen zoom via accessibility mode is truly awkward.)
Apple discussion forums likewise–on the iOS devices–impossible to read. The font, again, is tiny, and there is no way of resizing with text reflow. Ridiculous! Its own support forums are hard to use on its flagship products!
think you forgot to mention the search in the itunes store that like the app store, it has been terrible for years.
Let’s add the Beats Music search function to the things that suck list.
So what do you all think is the problem then? Apple’s got a really talented software team, so it’s crazy that this one area should be so neglected.
Think of it this way–Google has a really talented software team. How long has Google been working to refine “search”?
It’s more than just “find this word somewhere in the description.”
Absolutely. I appreciate that Google has been working on it for a long time, but there are tons of recommender systems and other search tools out there which work much, much better than Apple’s — and with fewer resources, to boot.
well your post actually just make me realise that guy they hired was probably not for making a search engine
but rather making these better maybe ?!
I’d like to see Apple establish an HTTPS-only search site that offers a proxy to the search results for interested users, and that makes no record of the user’s search terms or IP.
On second thought, never mind, I’ll simply use StartPage for that, and designate servers in the EU not the US for good measure so that more favourable privacy laws are in place.
It seems like Apple’s “Do it right from the beginning” had died with Steve Jobs, and customer service went down the drain; in Steve’s Era you could schedule a Genius Bar appointment at the nearest store to your location, now it has to be online which is a pain or by phone which is even worse (prepare yourself to be on hold for 45 to 60 minutes)
and be lucky that someone knowledgeable answer the phone. I forgot to mention that the machine ask for your product serial number and the first thin the associate ask for is the serial number of the product.
I used to rely on Spotlight regularly. No more. The Yosemite version insists it has found things that don’t even meet the search criteria in any meaningful way. It’s easier to use the search in Finder and then scroll through hundreds of irrelevant results.
for starters they could
1. clean up the metadata, searching and recommendation systems in iTunes etc. especially the metadata. I mean when you search for the name of a kid who was a major figure in all 8 Harry Potter films only has 3 of them listed in a search, something is wrong
2. rather than worrying about creating a full on search engine, start with merely connecting to other sources and aggregate the information. and from far more sources. It’s annoying when reviews are just from Rotten Tomatoes, or Yelp or whatever.