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Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by californical on Friday June 12, 2020 @07:02PM (#23504778)
Although this gets tricky -- will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" so that their app name is optimized to match a search term exactly? Maybe this already happens, but I can see it being hard to distinguish if the person is looking up a specific app called "podcast player" or a generic term
Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by leonidasv on Friday June 12, 2020 @07:29PM (#23504978)
You're assuming that just looking for the title is everything a search engine does when it's not.

It's easy to create and train a model to distinguish between brands and generic words by counting how many times a single word appears over app descriptions, for example - there are countless ways to do this. This, in turn, can neutralize the effect of naming your app after a generic word when it comes to search ranking.

Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by im3w1l on Saturday June 13, 2020 @12:19AM (#23506707)
How do you know it's not competitors putting the product in their descriptions enough times that it will count as generic so they can rank above? I mean you can solve that too I'm sure, but it starts becoming more complicated than sixothree originally suggested.
Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by lostlogin on Friday June 12, 2020 @08:35PM (#23505486)
> will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1"

This would be quite funny. I still see businesses called things like AAA automotive and similar which date back to optimising their telephone book listing order. Was this early SEO?

Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by EdwardDiego on Friday June 12, 2020 @09:12PM (#23505729)
Yeah, there's a lot of motels from the 70s in my city that start with the letter A, but the Aalton Motel presumably won that arms race.
Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by Dylan16807 on Saturday June 13, 2020 @03:17AM (#23507528)
Someone could manually set some keywords too.

But if there's too much uncertainty then just don't do ads at all. The fallback shouldn't be ads for all search terms.

Your post seems like a rebuttal to the idea of "just show the app they wanted", but that wasn't the request. The request was just to leave the search alone.

Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by duskwuff on Friday June 12, 2020 @09:59PM (#23506041)
Apple has control over that, though! They could easily reject applications with overly generic names if that were a concern.
Re:Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple d... by asiachick on Saturday June 13, 2020 @03:50AM (#23507685)
They already do don't they. Only Apple gets "Maps", "Mail", "Messages", etc...