Tale of Search Woes
I don’t know what has been going on (actually, I do), but we have been seeing a statistically significant increase in the sales of iHappyBirthday. It wasn’t too long ago that we noticed that our application would not appear in the search results if the search terms were “happy birthday”, though it was still search-able with the term “birthday”. It was odd because it has always been search-able by “happy birthday.”
We emailed Apple about it, and the response we got back was pure hilarity.
Search results are working as expected at this time. App Store search results are based on several factors determined by Apple-confidential algorithms.
I’m not sure what this super secret “Apple-confidential algorithms” were that made it unsearchable by “happy birthday”, but it at least it did make us laugh. It was most likely a canned response because search was actually broken.
Anyways, we didn’t realize how important it was for our application to be search-able by “happy birthday”, because as soon as search was fixed, our sales have doubled (albeit from a small number, but welcome none the less!).
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