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Comment by lehi | Hacker News Reader

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lehi

> Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already?

App Store search says.

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Apple support forum search. Developer documentation search. Developer forum search. All absolutely terrible.

I use Google with site:apple.com to search all of these instead.

If Apple search capabilities are a hidden asset, then they're very well hidden.

Apple Music search is also horrible. It's almost like they're doing something as naive as an exact string match.

Those examples would be a solid reason for Apple to invest in improving their search tech, which could naturally lead to launching a non-Google search engine to use across Apple apps possibly including Safari...

Google android app search is just as bad. That’s because “store search” is a totally different problem than indexing the web.

Even indexing the web is a different problem now than in 2000, users expect the search results that are SEO optimized for google.

If Apple wanted a search engine, they would have bought Yahoo for ~$4B when it was up for sale 4 years ago.

Yahoo open sourced it as Vespa.ai

Vespa is serving the home page, the web search stack is not open-sourced.

I've never used the Google Play store - is it actually much better?

No, it's pretty much garbage.

It's filled with ads and open source ripoffs. These kind of apps don't exist in App Store due to heavy human review.

It's worth mentioning that Apple's human review can be very incompetent. They rejected an update to iSH on TestFlight (https://ish.app) because the reviewer thought that the app's shell prompt was a "blank screen".

That said, in general, I appreciate the greater average quality of apps in the App Store.

> open source ripoffs

What's an open source ripoff?

I'm guessing it means rebranding an open source app that's actually available for free, and charging money for it.

A developer copies an open source app, adds advertisements, and publishes it to the play store as a closed source app. He promotes his app over the original app by paying Google.

I don't generally just browse apps so like if you know what you're looking for and go to it it's the same as if you searched an exact name on the apple one -- but if you're just browsing around it's got a lot of lower quality stuff.

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