The “enhanced” search bar was one of the recent features announced by Microsoft for the Xbox mobile app. Your behavior should be simple, intuitive and effective. But reality seems to disagree with theory and this feature receives several complaints from the Xbox community.
You can see it on Twitter, o and Reddit, where there is a thread with over 160 comments in just a few hours. The exposed facts do not leave Microsoft’s work in regard to this feature in good stead. And it is that in some cases it does not show the desired results, which makes it useless.
The search bar of the Xbox application in debate
As part of our job is to verify what we post, I wanted to do some testing and my conclusions are that while it’s not true that it always works wrong, there are certain search terms that seem to choke on it, like “Death”, some searches with this keyword skew the results.
I make my living optimizing content and websites for search engines, and I know very well how they work. So it looks like an index problem. In other words, the internal search engine is storing too much information and in some cases not giving it the correct weight, causing some searches to return irrelevant results. The case of “Dead” is perfect because it’s a word that appears in excess in game titles, descriptions, and metadata, so the bar can’t tell what the right result is to display or he must or not.
Microsoft has extensive experience with Bing, its search engine, although not as popular as Google's, works very well. So I guess it will be fixed soon.
