We've been seeing a lot of negativity directed towards the search bar on the Xbox app for mobile devices recently, and the most recent example stems from a post over on the Xbox Series X Reddit community about the situation.
It's been noted on various occasions that sometimes, when you search for a game, you get different results than you'd expect, with the Dead Cells image above being an example — and it's resulted in some pretty damning comments:
To be honest, the search bar on the Xbox app usually works well enough for us here at Pure Xbox, although we did have a notable problem with getting Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy to show up in the results a few weeks ago when it arrived on Game Pass, and Microsoft seems to have manually fixed that issue since then.
There's no doubt that the search functionality on the Xbox app could do with a few tweaks at the very least, although we haven't heard anything from Microsoft about whether any plans are in the works. Aside from this, we've generally been very pleased with the Xbox app in recent months, especially its excellent Remote Play feature.
Have you been struggling with the search feature in the Xbox app? Let us know in the comments.
Comments 17
It’s not great it actually think it’s better than the PlayStation app. That actually may be the worst search function I’ve seen.
Hehe, I’m also looking at you Bing 😏
The PS app I find to also have a terrible search, which is odd since searching from the PS web store works fine. With the release of Elden Ring, I was planning on picking back up the Dark Souls games, and searching for 'Dark Souls' in the PS app returned some interesting results. One would expect the first 3 games to show up at the top, not so much the case.
I'm not trying to be hilarious but isn't powered by Bing?
Sometime it doesn't work well for me too.
On the older Xbox app it used to work great, since they redesigned it the search is terrible.
@awp69 Neither are great but Xbox's app is MUCH worse.
For starters you get people/usernames first on Xbox... why?
Then the game results rarely even include what you want. e.g. Search "Dark Souls" on Xbox app under games it lists in order:
And another 7 games including Sekiro but NO Dark Souls at all. WTF?
PlayStation app fares a little better, it comes up with games initially, and gets Dark Souls Remastered first, then it goes weird for a bit, but at least it does have Dark Souls 2 and 3 further down.
Database search really isn't this hard it's a VERY simple query with game title as top priority, followed by description/tags if you want to include those.
Honestly this reminds me of the old Microsoft. Making code so bloated and overcomplicated that it stops doing it's primary function effectively.
Even the Microsoft Store has a poor search function. Tried buying Lego Skywalker Saga and had to go through support, ironically you can make a purchase through support which I ended up doing. The app needs work. How does it let you download a game you haven't purchased and why can't you purchase games through he app?
You write the exact title of a game and it’s not able to find it, it’s one of the worst search engine
Why just now? This hasn't worked right since this new iteration of the app that was released a year or two now.
Can someone tell me why hasn't xbox got an app to make purchases for your account?? Why isn't there an app to search for games and actually buy them?!?! To me it makes NO SENSE.
@StarWarsBoom Because they would need to pay Apple a 30% cut for any purchase in their iOS app.
Well, they can avoid it after the Apple vs Epic ruling by using a third party payment system, but when they first made the app there was no way to avoid the 30% cut.
The main issue i have is not being able to search sales on the app, or buy games normally on there. Seems ridiculous you can't yet you can on Playstation (although admittedly the banking part of that isn't working properly atm)
@heksesang That's true but sometimes you wanna sit on the couch looking at the ipad seeing whats on sale. It's just annoying you can't do that.
@Resi32 Exactly i have used the playstation app as well and its pretty good.
I always have a hard time searching for games in the Microsoft Store on my Xbox as well, It never shows what it’s supposed to.
Absolutely agree, I can't find Doom (2016) when I searched it on the app, what I get is Doom (2016) demo 😕
And while we're at it, the xbox ios app is terrible compared to playstation ios app, I can even browse and buy ps4/ps5 games on playstation ios app, you can't do that on xbox ios app.
I'd be willing to bet that MS is getting paid more money for advertisement for those games than they are Dead Cells.
New search engines aren't designed to find just what you are seeking, they want to find and highlight anything that it deems relevant. Think your social media or news feeds. Searched for dog food that one time?, great!, here are endless articles about dogs. Oh, and look at this thing that they're paying us to show you, because we've deemed you to be the target demographic for it.
Come get your lightspeed briefs.
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