Apple was found to manipulate App Store search results to give higher rankings to their apps

The Wall Street Journal recently published a commentary saying that although Apple has always emphasized the fairness of the ecological environment, it actually applied a better search ranking to its own. Under normal circumstances, the search ranking of the app store should be sorted by the relevance of the search term and the app rating, and the rating is submitted by the Apple user. However, the analysis report shows that many of Apple’s own applications are not highly rated and ranked high. Obviously, Apple actively favors its own applications in this session.

The analysis report mentioned that the Apple Books app score in the US app store did not reach five stars, but the search for the app is at the top of the search. However, in fact, this app ranks 168th in the category, and the app ranks in the top ranks in app stores in other regions except for the US region.

Amazon’s Kindle app has an average of 4.8 points in 1.2 million evaluations, but the Amazon Kindle app is not ranked first in the keyword category. In the map category, there are actually the same problems. For example, Apple Maps scores are not as high as Google Maps, but Google Maps rank is still not as good as Apple Maps.

At present, Apple has issued a statement on the matter. In the statement, Apple said that the company did not intervene in the search results and said that the search algorithm has many factors. For example, the keyword search will match the application name and the user’s behavior data, that is, the results of different user searches may be different.