Back in April, we were talking about an issue that was affecting the search bar in the Xbox mobile app. Fundamentally, his performance is erratic, and sometimes it’s hard to find something without going crazy. A big bug that has been active for 5 months and has not been resolved.
The problem with all of this is that we know that Microsoft was already working on the problem, but as new games are added things don’t get better, but instead get worse. This flaw makes games less noticeable, and it’s unclear how something so basic can seem so problematic.
The search bar in the Xbox app is nonsense
Personally it is a function that I use a lot. If you compare that to searching for something on Google Play, the differences are abysmal. In the Google store, finding something is easy, and the experience of those in Mountain View in searches makes it a pleasure to find new games based on what you have already researched. Something that’s light years away from the Xbox store, which has infinitely fewer games to show off, which makes it even more ridiculous…
I did some more tests and I see that the behavior is still poor. So much so that now it hides games, or it doesn’t stifle some research if you don’t give it a hand yourself. This is what I collected.
- Some games are excluded from the search, such as TemTem, Dead Cells or Left 4 Dead.
- Some games do not appear if you do not type the full name, for example “As Dusk Fall”. If you miss the S at the end, it finds nothing.
- Many games it finds them, but it shows them to you almost at the end. A good example is Dead Space, which should show this at the start and show a list of space games instead. With Monster Sanctuary, the same thing happens. And so on with a long etcetera.
I leave you with some random searches that I have done these days, without success and with results… which can be improved.
If I was one of the creators of these games, I would be very angry. At first I thought it was an indexing issue; but the whole system fails. Show only results based on exact keywords, but he is not able to weight them, nor to reinterpret the possible errors of writing which they contain; I insist, if you miss a letter, the results it generates are hilarious.
