According to news on August 24, after nearly a week of anxiety, domestic iOS application developers can finally calm down. Because the search algorithm adjustment in Apple’s App Store China has not changed too far, searching for apps by name has been restored.
Last Thursday, the search algorithm of Apple's App Store in China suddenly changed significantly. Searching by full name of some applications failed, and accurate matching results were not obtained. Since Apple has not given an official explanation, developers have fallen into various speculations and worries: some developers believe that Apple is testing the App Store search algorithm, while more developers would rather believe that there is a bug in the Apple App Store. Of course, some developers and business personnel from the development team also wrote emails to Apple to provide feedback and inquire about what happened.
After waiting anxiously for nearly a week, on Tuesday (August 21), the search algorithm of Apple’s App Store in China experienced a “callback”, and app search by name returned to normal.
"When I searched for our applications that day, we were the first one found." A business staff member from Tadu Literature told Sohu IT. Moreover, he found that it was even more accurate than before, "There are no other applications." However, this conclusion may not be true. Suitable for popular applications. Sohu IT found that when searching for well-known applications such as WeChat, Weibo, Changba, Three Kingdoms, etc., even if you follow the search prompts of the App Store, you cannot get unique results, but they are basically the first one on the homepage of the search results.
Apple did not provide any explanation for the above situation. However, a developer speculated that Apple may have been testing a new search algorithm before, but later changed it back due to many user reactions.
However, this "correction" is not an intact restoration, but also optimization of the search algorithm. The most obvious one is the strengthening of the correlation between search keywords and application names. The above-mentioned developers said that the new search algorithm has more restrictions on the keyword settings of bookstore applications. Previously, because bookstore applications could set keywords for each of their books, the entire application often used the names of many popular applications as keywords, thereby allowing itself to appear in the search results of many popular applications by name. This also causes it to often appear in the search results of many completely unrelated applications, which can almost be called a big BUG. The person said that such a situation does not occur in search applications now. “Search results are more relevant and cleaner.”
In addition, a person in charge of an application recommendation market said that they have recently observed that compared to before, some apps that are searched more frequently tend to be higher in the rankings. This shows that the weight of app searches may be slightly increased. However, they also said that remains to be seen.
Apple's urgency to improve and optimize its search ranking algorithm has always been high. In addition to acquiring Chomp, a third-party application search and recommendation platform, algorithms have been tested in European and American App Stores this year, but have not been officially implemented. The occurrence of the above events indicates that Apple’s search algorithm adjustment for the App Store in China has also been deployed, and now may be just the beginning.