Apple Music search is questionable
Published by marco on
There isn’t that much more to say than that it seems like a $4T company is incapable of making something as straightforward as music search work in anything approaching a comprehensible manner. The evidence is below.
I searched for the album Apple Cores by the James Brandon Lewis Trio. The top hit was Danny Elfman, for no discernible reason, followed by a smattering of completely random search results, like Greatest Love Story by LANCO, Sweet Child O’ Mine, a playlist called “Family Time”, another one called “Sing: ‘60s”, and another called “Rock in Spatial Audio.”
Search 'Apple Cores James Brandon Lewis Trio'
It’s like the query gave whatever mishmash of hot garbage and LLM that they’re using to search their database an aneurysm. You might think that this was a result of them not having that album, but that’s not the case. When I search for just Apple Cores, then the sought-for album and songs came up as the first hits.
This should be a straightforward match, no? It should be in an index. The index should have matched on the exact words. There is no magic needed. We’ve known how to perform these searches for half a century. I bet Apple is using “intelligence” for its queries and now it will sometimes get very obvious and easy things completely wrong for utterly unknown reasons. I hope it’s worth it. I doubt it, though.