Search algorithms are breaking down everywhere
I’ve noticed the Apple Music search acting quite wonky over the last couple of years. It seems utterly incapable of finding certain songs, even when you enter the exact title and artist.
I’ve had cases where Apple Music has dozens of albums from that artist, so that I’m almost certain that the song is available. It just will not show it to me. In those cases, I’ve instead searched with DuckDuckGo using the same title and artist to find out the name of the album. With the album name in hand, I can select it in Apple Music and, lo and behold, there’s the song I was looking for with the title I’d entered.
I am mystified how marketing and search-algorithm tweaking can break a feature so fundamentally that a user it utterly unable to find things that are actually there. I don’t have any screenshots from one of those excursions—because the search has been a bit better in the last couple of revisions.
I have, however, recently had the following experience. The following screenshot shows something I’ve experienced a few times by now.[1]
Search for Here by Soccer Mommy
Can you see how the result for which I’d explicitly searched is perched shyly at the end of the list? What kind of design is this?
I’ve much more often seen the artist in the prominent first location, then perhaps the album on which the song appears in the second location, with the song itself in the third position.
I am using the operating system in en-US, which is a left-to-right language. Left position is the most prominent. How is it that the song for which I’d searched isn’t in the most prominent position?
Even in the case that I’ve outlined above—where the first and second positions are filled with valid, but less precise results—that would be silly; in the case shown in the screenshot above, it’s just laughably obvious that someone wants to boost “Waka Waka” and “Ride It”, for whatever reason.
Or maybe this is the boon provided by AI search results I’ve been hearing so much about. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords and their boundless wisdom.
[1]
Don’t judge me too harshly for searching for “Soccer Mommy”. I follow Nicky Reid’s blog (exile in happy valley) and the articles there almost always end with a delightfully eclectic mix of songs that I’ve been adding to a playlist and shuffling every once in a while.
Update 2023-10-23:
I just searched another song that ended up with very strange results, but I noticed that I’d inadvertently searched for “‘m allowed by buffalo tom” rather than “I’m allowed by buffalo tom” (with the “I” missing at the beginning).
vs.
Looking more closely at the search argument in the original query from the body of the article, I see that it has a trailing “ “. I wonder if the search algorithm is thrown off by punctuation?
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