Marco Arment:
While a good search-ad system could benefit the App Store, customers, and many of us, nothing in Apple’s track record suggests that they’re willing or able to do this well.
But a bad search-ad system, on top of bad search, will only further damage the App Store, funnel more of our already slim margins back into Apple like a massive regressive tax, and erode customers’ confidence in installing new apps.
I’ll be honest: I can’t imagine a scenario where this would go well.
Marco’s best point was that Google was doing organic search well, on a much larger, uncurated universe, before they did search ads. At the same time Apple does organic search poorly on a tiny, well curated universe.
Totally agree. It was his best point, and it is a very good one.
It’s almost like Apple still doesn’t “get” the Internet. A lot of Apple’s issues are net-related. Every time I use the App Store I feel like I’m using a bad website. Parts of iTunes feel like bad websites. On the other hand, I’m a web developer by day, so everything looks like a nail to me. But if the App Store was an actual website, they could use Google’s code to provide a search mechanism and it’d be a million times better.
SEO screws up search. When the only way to promote is via SEO, you get messed up search. Search ads alleviate the demand for SEO. Therefore, search ads actually help improve the search results. Google search would be far more gamed if there was no way to put ads on those results; the pressure to manipulate the results would be sky high. The only issue with ads + search is that Google keeps devoting so much real estate to them. The fact there are ads is part of the secret sauce that keeps the results column cleaner.