Apple officially rolls out App Store search suggestions feature

Credit: AppleInsider

Apple has officially rolled out search suggestions on the App Store, allowing users to discover apps with more granular controls.

The search suggestions will appear when users perform a standard search on the App Store. Selecting one or more suggestions will refine the search, letting users more easily discover specific types of apps.

Introducing search suggestions on the App Store!

Select (or deselect) multiple suggestions to refine your search so you can find even more amazing apps and games.

Search suggestions roll out today starting with the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia. pic.twitter.com/viaZHlCZMb
— App Store (@AppStore) April 29, 2021

Searching "food," for example, will bring up options such as "delivery" or "recipes." Running a search for "games" may bring up categories like "puzzle" or "car." Users can select any one or more of these terms to narrow down their search results.

Apple began quietly testing the feature earlier in April. It appears to be a server-side change because AppleInsider was able to use the search tags on an iPhone running iOS 14.4.2.

The new search suggestions feature is rolling out starting Thursday in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia.

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6 Comments

igforbes

said about 2 years ago

Allow me to sort by average customer review and we can talk.

ralphie

said about 2 years ago

Allow me to actually just search for the exact app name. Just let me disable all “suggestions”.

dewme

said about 2 years ago

This sounds like the faceted search model (based on faceted classification schema) I've been hoping for. It won't solve every issue with the App Store but it is a step in the right direction. Faceted classification is a fascinating topic in library science dating back nearly 100 years. It's a solution to a problem that's been waiting for the processing and storage horsepower needed to implement it in real time and at scale for a library of content as widely diverse and as open as what exists in the App Store.There have been plenty of implementations that have a very constrained set of facets, e.g., Kayak Flight Search tool, and it sounds like Apple is starting with a fairly limited number of facets, but it's all about laying down the foundation and building on it. I can easily imagine that AI and ML aided by Apple's neural engine power will add another tool to go after this problem. Ultimately, individual users should be able to define their own facets and make it more open ended and extensible.

To the previous poster, there's nothing preventing Apple from adding "average customer review" as a facet in the model.

applguy

said about 2 years ago

Would love the Price filter to be more useful to filter out apps with in app purchases. Currently only Any and Free.

Any
Paid
Paid with IAP
Free
Free with IAP

rundhvid

said about 2 years ago

I remember when the App Store could be explored and new apps discovered within a couple of hours on an iPhone 3GS 🤭
Bt the time I had upgraded to a 4S, the App Store itself had become useless as a means to discover new/updated apps because of all the crap that drowned the content I was looking for—today’s story tells me that the flood of apps wasn’t actually crap, and the problem first-and-foremost a matter of deficient search function. From the above posts, I get the impression that the continuous updating and categorization of the App Store inventory is more complex than I expected but I am very optimistic about this enhanced functionality 🤓👍🏽