Google Play Store has added something that, without being a big leap, had not been there for too long: a search bar within reviews. Nothing special, but anyone who has wasted ten minutes scrolling through comments trying to find out if a banking app works on rooted phones knows what was needed.
The operation is simple. You enter an app's profile, go to the reviews, press “See all reviews” and the bar appears at the top. You can also get there from the magnifying glass icon just below the AI-generated review summary. The function has been in testing since November and is now generally deployed with the release 50.7.24-31 of the Play Storealthough the arrival on all devices may take days or weeks — it's Google, you know.
Useful, but with room for improvement
That said, it has its limitations. It needs at least two words to work, the results don't update as you type, and the search is completely literal: if you don't use the exact term that appears in the reviews, nothing appears. It does offer suggestions for popular searches, which helps, but a basic semantic search would have made a real difference. It will surely come, but for now it is not.
In any case, it is a concrete advance for a store that has historically largely ignored the problem navigating thousands of comments. It is not the only recent improvement, either: Google has also activated alerts for apps that consume battery excessively, warning when something is draining the phone more than normal. The kind of small detail that doesn't make the headlines but gets noticed.
Do you think Google should have included semantic search from the beginning, or do you prefer that they test features gradually?
