The loyal Xbox community is banding together to “force” Microsoft to fix the broken search bar of the Xbox app as soon as possible.
Taking to Reddit earlier today, a user shared a screenshot to prove the dismal state of the Xbox app. Using its search bar to search for Dead Cells for example brings up a number of games like Martha is Dead, State of Decay 2: Juggernaut Edition, Back 4 Blood, and Hades; but not Dead Cells.
The search bar of the Xbox app is apparently designed to search the descriptions of all games instead of just their titles. That is why the search results seldom show the game in question and instead show a variety of other games which contain part of the query.
The problem is, however, not new. Many users reported incorrect search results last year as well. At the time, the Xbox app was believed to be producing random results for every search term, making it fairly difficult to purchase games or even bring up a purchased game to unlock additional post-release content.
The broken state of the search bar also makes it quite a frustrating experience to search for users you want to connect with on the Xbox app.
From the looks of it, the search bar of the Xbox app searches for each query separately. Searching for Outer Wilds for example will see the app scour for titles containing either Outer or Wilds as separate entities. Hence, instead of Outer Wilds, you will get perhaps The Outer Worlds.
Some users have found a workaround by adding conjunctions to their search query. Using the same example, searching for Outer and Wilds will have a better chance of producing Outer Wilds at the top.
In either case, Microsoft needs to address the matter and improve the current state of the Xbox app’s search bar.
