Apple offers all-new related search suggestions feature for more discoverability

Mar 25, 2014 12:48 GMT  ·  By

More than a year after acquiring app search startup Chomp, Apple has begun offering some advanced search / discovery functions on its App Store. Customers looking for games, for instance, will be able to find suggestions like “RPG games,” etc.

Discovered by developer Olga Osadcha and later reported by several other sources, the related search feature apparently hasn’t cropped up internationally. Rather, it’s available in select countries and looks like in the screenshots above.

Using the query “calendar,” for instance, offers suggestions like “calendar planner” and “daily planner,” which may well be app titles in and of themselves, but are offered as sub-categories.

The feature is most likely borrowed from Chomp, the app search company acquired by Apple in 2012.

With more than a million titles on file, the crowded iTunes App Store cannot just rely on general categories like newspapers and magazines in Newsstand, games and entertainment, kids, education, business, news, sports, health & fitness, travel, etc.

However, as Federico Viticci reveals, the service needs a lot more work if it’s going to help people reach the apps they want in fewer taps than before. His example reveals that searching for “work” somehow landed him on the Instagram page.

It appears that suggestions are being served as actual related topics rather than the user’s taste or purchase history, but all this may change in the future to better target everyone.