Deceptive search results for apps on Apple's iOS store reappeared again recently, with users led to gaming and lottery apps irrelevant to their search words, Beijing Youth Daily quoted a media report as saying.
On the early morning of Jan. 13, gaming and lottery apps showed up on the store's results list when users tried to search for "Baidu", "Tencent" or "Sina" as keywords. The situation continued until 10 am, said the report.
It was not the first time deceptive results appeared on Apple's app store. It happened four years ago, when Apple Inc did not comment.
Companies providing services to boost app rankings are easily available online, the newspaper reported. After linking to some key words, developers can make apps appear on the top of the store's search ranking list after buying a service named "key word listing."
Rankings at Apple's app store are determined by many factors including comments, and the number of downloads, installs and unloads, with downloads having the strongest influence. Ranking services charge 20,000 yuan ($2,905) to 270,000 yuan according to the rankings required by app companies, the report said. Boosted results can remain high on the list for several hours.
An employee with the Apple support hotline said apps related to deceptive rankings would be removed from the online store and developers would be warned once the store has proved complaints from users are true.
