Most people use iTunes (on a Mac or PC) or the App Store app (on iOS) to look for apps. However, I’ve long used iTunes Preview in the browser to grab information for the many app and game reviews I write. This is simply a speed thing—iTunes remains slothful and you can’t easily copy information from it; by contrast, grabbing information from the browser is child’s play.

Typically, the quick way to get to such pages was to type ‘iTunes [app name]’ into Google. With rare exceptions, the app would be the first result. A couple of months ago, this began to change. I noticed iTunes Preview pages sliding down the rankings or vanishing entirely. On March 19, I said the following on Twitter:

Searches in Google for “[App name] iTunes” (to access the iTunes Preview page) are often rarely #1 these days. In Bing, they usually are. I’ve noticed a big slide re those results in recent months. Must be algorithmic, unless Google’s now specifically penalising iTunes Preview.

During the rest of March, things got much, much worse, to the point I subsequently switched to Bing as my default search engine while working on the latest issue of Tap! magazine, on the basis Google was driving me nuts and wasting my time with its inexplicable wrecking of iTunes Preview rankings. Last week on Twitter, I called the changes “irritating” and “also deeply suspicious”. Although I wanted to give Google the benefit of the doubt, the fact remains it’s in a major mobile war with Apple and so hampering its competitor is beneficial from a business standpoint; and even if the change is purely based on adjustments to Google’s algorithm, the knock-on effect remains the same.

Yesterday, TechCrunch, The Next Web and The Verge all discovered what I’d noticed myself weeks ago, although TechCrunch then provided the inaccurate advice that adding the ‘iTunes’ keyword to a search query

appears to be necessary in order to see the iTunes URL returned to the top spot, which has long been a trick savvy Google users know to use to get the results ranked higher.

In fact, this does little. Adding ‘iTunes’, ‘App Store’ or ‘iTunes Preview’ results in little if any changes to the majority of searches; elsewhere, I’ve noticed when iTunes Preview is highly ranked, it’s often via an affiliate code (for example, games searches often have IGN’s affiliate URL near the top of the heap).

Google recently gave the BBC a slap for “unnatural links” and has now told The Verge:

We’ve been having some issues fetching pages from the iTunes web servers, and as a result some people may have had problems finding iTunes apps in search easily. We’re working with the team there to ensure search users can find what they’re looking for.

I do hope this is the case, and that Google acts and fixes the problem promptly, because it’s supposed to be a search engine, not a manually curated set of links that mostly benefits Google. Still, with the results lists getting wrecked by sign-in preferences, Google+, advertising and other factors, part of me’s surprised Google’s responded at all. I also have that nagging feeling about this being a screw-up; it reminds me of when Google got caught short bypassing Safari security settings.

In the meantime, you’ve three options to get iTunes searches back:

  1. Change your default search engine to something other than Google.
  2. Use a launcher like Alfred that enables you to do ad-hoc searches in a non-default search engine. (For example, I have reverted my default search engine to Google, but use Alfred and ‘bing [app name]’ for iTunes Preview and some other searches.)
  3. Use ‘site:itunes.apple.com’ before your search term in Google, which will usually return the app at or near the number-one spot.