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2025 0628 Search is not a user feature

Jeff Johnson notes that Apple sees App Store search as a feature it offers developers not users, implying that user intent isn’t a sufficient goal in and of itself.

What I found striking about the search differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is that in creating this distinction, Apple clearly considers App Store search to be a developer feature rather than a user feature. In other words, the user's interest in finding an app via search is disregarded, and Apple is willing to be less helpful to users to the extent that app developers pay a lesser commission to Apple.
Jeff Johnson, "App Store search is not a user feature"

I was reminded of this today as I typed the same query into:

  • Kagi
  • DuckDuckGo
  • Google
  • GitHub
  • StackExchange
  • Reddit

One used to be able to find results from GitHub, StackExchange, and Reddit on major search engines, especially Google, but major content sites have recently closed off the overwhelming majority of their works to any automated consumers, including search engines, in pursuit of deals with LLM training companies.

Subjectively, visiting github to type in its search box feels unbecoming. I love that I can carry on a personal conversation with an unfathomable blob of numbers distilled from the sum of recorded human knowledge, but I would also like to be able to search that human knowledge for literal text strings at times. Didn’t we have a better way of doing this pretty recently?

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