How can a site this large get away with such a basic functionality not working as any of their users would want for such a long time? Did it ever work?

I think I've noticed it not working like 5 or 6 years ago when I was shopping for shoes, if not earlier than that. Keep in mind that even without Zappos, they're in the business of selling shoes, too, and have ran some crazy promotions around shoes, too.

Have you ever tried searching for apps on the Google/Android Play store? It's a complete disaster if you're trying to find something specific that's not in the top 20 apps. Given that Search is Google's specialty my personal conclusion is that search is fundamentally broken on the Play Store on purpose.

There are so many apps released constantly since their only hope is to get into "new apps" lists which lasts probably a week or so, if they don't get enough installs then it is usually the end.

So I guess google just heavily filters, limits and shuffles apps so they are somewhat evenly distributed but it does look to end users like a buggy search that can't decide if it has the app or not returning different results for the same query.

Whatever. If I enter the name of an app verbatim at the search field, Google should put that app at least around the first page of results.

Currently, it often doesn't. I don't care much about fairness for the app distributors, but I suspect the current schema is much less fair than a good search. (The phone ecosystems are all so broken, why doesn't anybody create one that works as the user says?)

I don't know if it ever worked; it's certainly not worked for a long time. I recall thinking that amazon is very good at optimizing things, but their targets are different from mine.

They can get away with it, because we still use them, I guess.