So I’m browsing through Apple’s OS X downloads section today and I decided to do a little search to see the iTunes software they had available. I immediately realized that this was a futile effort as my results looked like this:

The listing is terrible. The navigation controls aren’t at the top. It seems to be clipping out potentially relevant information with the elipsis. Further, in what order are these results being displayed. Given I searched for “iTunes” in this example, why is  the “pause itunes” Automator plug-in almost as important as the iTunes software itself? And given the search returned over 23,000 results, it seems like a little Google-izing might be helpful here.

This wouldn’t be so bad if other listings from their database of shareware/freeware didn’t look so clean and nice, like this:

This is a clean, easy-to-read listing and if I need to find out why a particular item matched I can always click the product name to find out more.

If you have ever searched Apple’s Support database, you already know that the company has some challenges around delivering relevant results. How many times, after futilely searching Apple’s Support yourself, have you had to read another blog or another support site to find the Support Document ID you needed?

Apple, you are this week’s Worst…search…ever winner.