Open Radar

 
Hello App Store Team-

Forgive me Apple, for I have sinned.  It's been forever since my last radar.  I'm sorry I'm not better at writing radars as soon as I find problems.  It's tough as an indie game dev to battle the giants & keep a great flow of awesomeness flowing to my millions of players.  To get products out the door, I often find a workaround & ship instead of working with you to get the problem fixed.  I still owe you a radar on LLVM optimization math errors when you don't set an initial value to a float before you use it in math (works fine with no optimization, but fails miserably with optimization on).  Instead of that radar, you get an App Store radar.  An App Store search algorithm change just crushed my main revenue stream, so my fingers made time to pound out this radar.  Here we go.

Summary: When searching for a specific paid app name, the iOS App Store does not return that app name as the top result.

Steps to Reproduce: Open the App Store on a device or through iTunes. Search for "Air Hockey" - note that Air Hockey (by Acceleroto) now returns as the fourth result instead of the first.

Expected Results:  If a user searches for a specific app name in the App Store, that app should appear first if it's an exact match.  If there are multiple apps with an exact match, the "best" one should be listed first (yes, big brain in the back that just said "huh?", there are cases of multiple apps having the exact same name).

Actual Results:  App Store search results are now biased (even more than before) toward apps with more downloads.  This means that free apps with keywords matching the search result show up before paid apps with the exact search string in the app title.

Regression:  For the last 4 years, when searching for "Air Hockey," my app has been listed first.  I'm a big fan of that.  Air Hockey's fans are big fans of that (I made that part up.  I don't have any real data to support that).  It was a #1 game in the App Store & has been featured in the App Store & on devices in Apple Stores tons of times...showing up first makes sense, right?

Notes:  There are two apps in the App Store named "Air Hockey."  There are several other apps whose names also appear as "Air Hockey," but they use unicode characters from some of the letters instead of English characters.  My Air Hockey app has the highest downloads of the two apps named Air Hockey.  When a user searches for a specific string and there is an exact match, shouldn't that be displayed first?

Currently, my free app, Air Hockey Gold, shows up first when searching for "Air Hockey."  Here's that app:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/air-hockey-gold/id353410847?mt=8

Currently, my paid app, Air Hockey, shows up fourth when searching for "Air Hockey" (you know that by now though).  Here's that app:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/air-hockey/id286106725?mt=8

Love you guys.  See you at WWDC.
-Bryan
@GrouchoDuke

p.s. I'm not Catholic.  I don't really know how that confessional thing goes.  I probably offended someone with my opening paragraph.  I'll buy you a beer if you'd like to talk about how horrible I am.