There's also the UK practice of deliberately mangling French for comedic effect, as in Del Boy's cries of "Bain Marie!" and "chateuneuf-de-paper!" on 1980s TV. Saying "Toot sweet" can fit right into that bucket.
I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for
ublock origin lite
“ublock origin lite”
For the unquoted search, there are twelve different apps/items returned above it - you really have to scroll down to find it at number 13.
Even for the quoted search, it’s returned in fourth place.
More interestingly the second time I searched with quoted it’s in third place, and the third time of searching the sponsored items at the top is getting even more random.
It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications. At the very least a 100% substring match should be very visible in the result. If not at the top, then there should be sorting criteria, to make it appear at the top, so that one can sane-ify the search result, when it is not sane.
A good example for bad search is the windows start menu. If you just logged in and the system is still loading (whatever it is doing all that long...) and you press the super key and then start typing, it might be too slow to find things _locally on your disk_, and might start searching online. When you have developed an automatism and just continue typing and then hit enter/return key, you will get some online shit result shown in Edge or some Microsoft store shit, instead of simply launching your already installed app. A critical race right there in the start menu. It's baffling.
Recently, there was a reddit post about a KDE menu search thing just as silly. It would not prioritize the title/name of an app, but instead, after typing 3 or more characters, find a word in the description of a launcher/starter of other apps and show those first, even though the 3 chars or more are a perfect substring of the name of an app.
People reinvent simple search and make silly searches over and over again. One of the main criteria is, that a substring match must lead to being high in the results, if not the top result. Shorter wins vs longer, because the match has higher percentage of match with the full title/name. Beginning of the string matched? Higher in results. All very basic things, that shouldn't be difficult to implement.
It helps to realize that the search is less of a tool for you to find information and more of a tool to show you an ad targeted on your search query. That's why ads are the top results and the organic data you wanted is after the fold. You're asking an ad company for information, and you don't expect an ad as a result? They are only continuing to show the organic results to tease you into coming back..
The original comment was about Apple's App Store. I assume there are financial ways to get your App "featured" there or something like that but as far as I know, you can't financially take direct influence on whatever logic Apple uses to sort search results there. Yet, it can still be spectacularly difficult to find an App - even if you type in its exact name, as indicated by OP (can confirm from my experience).
If you have a theory about what Apple's motivation to actively serve such bad results could be, I'd be interested to hear it. I've always sort of assumed that the root cause for this is some combination of neglect on Apple's part and attempts at gaming the system by developers (I don't know much about developing for the App Store, but I presume there are forms of SEO-like activities that can be done in attempts to bump up your app).
Most ad sales platforms have auctions for ad slots and/or keywords. If you want to game the system and have money to burn as growth hacking, you can place a larger value in those auctions/keywords to win a chance at your ad being placed in front of more eyeballs. When it comes to apps/games especially, people will chose whatever is posted from laziness, fomo, or just tired of looking and picking the easy route. I suspect that when you get an unrelated ad to your search, it's because someone else was willing to spend more money for those search terms than someone with more relevant matches. It's always going to be about those Benjamins.
I get that it's always be about money in the end but I understand this sub-thread to be a bit more specific: Is there an ad sales platform run by Apple where your Benjamins have influence on the search ranking in the App Store? I and many other people here are not talking about things that are clearly ads (like a "featured" result or the ads shown by google and other search engines).
Why do people continue asking this question? Why do people think Apple is not collecting data to serve ads? Do they not remember being asked about it when setting up their devices when the ask if you want to share or not? Have they not seen the privacy options about Apple's ad network? Is it actual ignorance or head in the sand?
The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too. It seems like it only searches within the past few days or something, if I try searching for something from a while back it never finds it. And they removed the feature to quickly scroll back to a date in the past, so the only way to dig up old texts is to manually scroll back in a conversation and hope you find it. It's absolutely ridiculous that the search is so bad when it's an app by Google of all companies.
> The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too.
It's literally all Google products. They've just simplified and contextualized and added other things over the years such that if you're not searching for something already above the fold then it won't show up.
When I was using Gmail I had an email with important information that I needed about once a year. I knew the exact subject and who it was from but it would never show up in search. It was my only starred email so I could find it on demand.
Part of the reason I pay for Shortwave is because its basic search is so much better than Gmail's. I don't even use the LLM except for more descriptive searches, which it is also quite good at.
I recommend fastmail for calendars. Its pretty convenient, if you host your mail there already. CalDAV is really nice too so you can use your fancy calendar management apps, like thunderbird or outlook.
Shared docs I haven't cracked yet but I haven't needed to. But I hear nextcloud can do it. But that's a whole can of worms.
That's funny because iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface. I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.
Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.
Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).
Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.
I personally sent several scathing emails directly to directors about the issue. I have a long iMessage history and there was a point that just entering a single character in the search field would lock up my mac, let alone my older iPhone.
I have noticed and appreciate the change, so my headcanon is that they actually do read feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you type the name of the person, it should allow you to create a filter for "Messages with: Person". It should also pop up a filter bubble for photos. From there I think you can type in some query and it should do a query on the photos via text. I don't think you can add your date filter though.
Second way would be to open that conversation view, click on the contact icon at the top of the view, which should then bring you to a details page that lists a bunch of metadata and settings about the conversation (e.g. participants, hide alerts, ...). One of the sections shows all photos from that conversation. Browse that until you find the one you care about.
I admit I was wrong in my understanding of iMessages capabilities.
I remembered its search sucking, and also it not working on all my devices, so I quit using it and regurgitated a stale criticism.
Still, the search is useless to me if I can't do it on my linux desktop (like I can with email, discord, and every other chat service I use), so I'd still say iMessage has a laughably lacking search by nature of it only working on ios/macos, when all other chat apps I use offer at least some search on ios/android/linux
KDE search is super good, if you're referring to krunner. It searches everything, bookmarks, open tabs, filenames, paths, and even file contents. And it's really fast.
You have to turn the file indexer on or install it if you don't have it. Try `baloo status` or `baloo6 status`. Poke around in setting too so you can index what you need and not temp files.
The search is pulling from a bunch of sources in a particular order and returning results as it finds them probably. I wouldn't expect it to be anything sinister.
Indeed, it's called Plasma Search, available in system settings. Providers can be enabled, disabled, and configured at will. I can't imagine it would be all that difficult to code your own and get it hooked up in there, if you were so inclined. Personally I just unchecked everything except "Applications" and I use it like a quick launcher. Works great for my purposes.
I use it exactly like that too. It's too jarring to get anything else in the results for me and while I can't imagine why anyone would include any other source, to each their own.
Ok, this is too good. When I clicked on the App Store link, it opened the App Store and a "What's New" dialog popped up and the only thing highlighted was "Improved Search".
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications
Not really, if you understand how modern search algorithms work.
Pagerank[1] relies on link analysis -- you see who links to whom, and combine that with information on the traffic each site gets to suss out which sites are more likely to be sought out.
None of that data is available when you're searching through your local hard drive -- you have to use basic search operators like AND, OR, or use negation (Eg: "Star Wars -film" to find information on the space laser thing)
Unfortunately, we don't train folks on how to search anymore, so when "the algorithm" doesn't produce what they are looking for, folks have no ability to conduct their own search.
I watched an elderly mathematics professor manually type a full URL into the windows search box, complete with "https", and I thought to myself "surely that won't work" and lo and behold...
You mean he searched for a URL and received something that was an exact match as his sole result? Sounds like the search worked perfectly.
What do you think should've happened? The search say "I know what you're searching for, but I refuse to help because your dumb ass should've typed this into a web browser address bar?"
This isn't 1995. Computers have access to the Internet, and there's no reason your computer's search bar should only search local.
Now, if he'd had a file with that as its name, and a text document with that URL, I would've expected those first. Maybe not at first. Depends on disk space allocated to indexing.
I didn’t mean to elicit hostilities, my comment is in the context of the parent comment where they are discussing displeasure with the web search results coming from the Windows search bar. As a more technically literate user, I would prefer for no web results except from my web browser, but I was sharing a corollary to that.
Not to stick up for the search in the app store, but I don't think it is necessarily that straightforward, particularly where there is money to be made by gaming the ranking.
Tangent; put lists in alphabetical order! Or some other order which makes sense to the user in the context, like date, or priority. Something which is not unordered, coincidence, whatever the hashtable or nosql DB produced, order of creation when that isn't an important ordering in the domain, some internal or even visible GUID.
Worse if there's no filter, worse if it's a dropdown and there's no way to type the desired name, only look.
Its great for the app store if people mistakenly download the wrong app. They can increase the total downloads stats for more than one app that way. And it creates more "engagement' with the app store. They don't care that it's "forced" engagement
It blocks robocalls. When someone calls you it checks the call against a database of robocallers and blocks known spam calls. It can also screen calls. It works pretty well, but it's not worth $7/week.
Seriously, especially when the substring is in the title or filename. Google drive searching is infuriating for that. It will pull up barely related documents to my search term that has the word buried in the content, and not even show the file that has my search term verbatim in the filename or title. If there's one company I expect a really great search experience with, it's Google, and yet it's been this way for years and years...
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications.
You mean to say that you think they just somehow forgot to optimize these fundamental things to work well? No.... If the search functionality provided by an otherwise highly capable, ultra-rich tech company is an utter piece of shit, it's intentional. The optimization is elsewhere, while the users are left stuck with a deformed excuse.
Anyone downvoting feel like instead explaining their reasoning? Or just how search can be such utter shit in certain contexts, despite often being developed by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and even fucking Google of all things?
I just searched for uBlock. Top result is an ad for another ad blocker. Second result is an ad blocker called "Ublock", with "Origin" in its tags; a clear scam whose purpose is to leech off the reputation of uBlock Origin and trick people.
Apple's App Store is chock full of scams like this. It's not just bad search, it's a failure to enforce any kind of anti scam policy (combined with seemingly intentionally terrible search).
> god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app
I literally have an app installed on my iPhone called “Android TV” (a remote to control android smart TVs, which I used to have years ago), and it says “Connect to Android TV” in giant header typeface on the app homescreen.
Searching for “Android” on app store brings up even more apps containing that word in the name and in the app, including third-party non-Google apps.
We have an app for our platform and that app has a news section, we were rejected because we had news about Android devices. We are at this point providing a filtered news list where items with certain keywords are excluded on Apple devices. Maybe it's because of the app category.
Apple’s App Store makes so much revenue (mainly through the slightly more legit scams like gacha games, but plenty through weekly subscriptions for outright scam apps too) that there are many incentives for that team to never clean this up.
It’s a huge driver of what Apple pushes as the future of the company: services. It has been this way for more than a decade now: "What the hell is this????Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings? Remember our talk bout becoming the 'Nordstroms' of stores in quality of service?“ - Phil Schiller in 2012 (https://www.imore.com/hilarious-phil-schiller-email-reveals-...)
The problem is that people like us use Homebrew (and tell our families to), so there’s little incentive to complain loudly about this issue. Browser extensions and the occasional one-off app are the only reasons to go there.
Why do people think a browser is safe to use? Why do people think any app is safe to use? Why do people think a website is safe to use? Why do people think an OS is safe to use? Why do people think a driver is safe to use? Why do people think a firmware is safe to use? Why do people think a hardware device is safe to use? Why do people think the chips inside are safe to use? Why do people think an ISP is safe to use?
If you have a point to make about it being particularly unsafe or different from any other internet/software trust, make that point. Otherwise you know well enough that there isn't any other option but trust, and people generally trust stuff until given a good reason not to.
The point is that Safari's extension system requires using the App Store, not that it's inherently safer. In some ways, the "App" model that Safari uses could be more unsafe, regardless of Apple's code review.
Nonetheless, a critical engagement of software "safety" would require another few thousand words, at least.
Yes. Spotlight search for the Application launcher use-case was close to the speed and quality of LaunchBar (which still works that way of course) when Apple first introduced the command-space shortcut, on vastly slower “oughts” computers. Today it’s much slower and less consistent.
However we know that they could easily do a simple search effectively because Apple’s Launchpad has a perfect app search built in. If you give Launchpad a global shortcut you can press <shortcut>saf<return> and be assured it will instantly open safari every time. Of course, LaunchBar (no affiliation, but I’ve been using it for 22 years) still beats that in every way.
My favourite was back in os7. I didn't really use the file system because you just started typing the name of the file and it came up instantly. I'm not sure why companies have to break simple stuff that works well.
MacOS to me started to regress ~2012. I can’t remember what specific release it was, but one major MacOS release around then no longer remembered my MacBook’s external monitor layouts between work and home anymore and it was always “random”.
Spotlight, AirTunes/Airplay, iTunes, etc all also just slowly degraded. It’s like Steve Jobs was personally doing all QA and it just stopped when he died. I remember iTunes genius being SO GOOD that it cost me a fortune in song purchases, but now that apple just gets my monthly music payment, discovering new music is hard again.
Eh, as a person then uses both occasionally... I feel like they're pretty on-par?
Is the osx search performing so much better on your end? If so, in results or speed? Because for me, both osx and windows searches leave me annoyed anytime I try to use them, it's so bad that I usually prefer to use CLI tools on both platforms ...
On the azure win11 desktop I am using professionally (only windows I use) a large fraction of the time you can't even search anything because the windows menu just freeze.
Same for me, But OSX seems to have a similar issue at least on my MacBook Pro M1.
I occasionally get the multicolor disk spinner which locks all UI interactions for a few seconds (10-30s) until it unfreezes and works as before again...
Haven't been able to figure out the exact cause for it, feels very random.
I know that occasionally, the Spotlight index can get corrupted, and you have to manually delete it and let it regenerate. If you search for that with your current OS version, you should be able to find some decent instructions for it.
(My guess is that the Windows issue is something similar? but I have no experience with it, so don't know if it can be fixed in a similar way)
Don’t do that! You’ll be left behind by society— rendered penniless and fatally inconvenienced by the lack of tooling to exponentially improve your productivity!
While it’s clearly not everybody, in my and a number of other users’ personal onedrives, search hasn’t worked since May. Zero results for any search in any context. No response from MS other than essentially “yep! Sorry! Working on it! Promise! In the interim, try just remembering where everything is maybe! lol!”
I’m sure there’s some indexing thing I could take care of, but windows edges out spotlight for me for both ineffectiveness and slowness on every machine I use. For me, windows used to be far better than spotlight. It’s strange to me how much better the command line tools do essentially the same job, and that, anecdotally, the GUI ones seem to be getting worse?
They definitely are bad at search. When I type “safar” into iOS settings, it says “no results for “safar”” while it looks for the fucking built-in browser’s search page.
Weird. I get lots of relevant results with Safari at the top. Which somehow makes it a little worse: I’d naively think we should get identical results.
I can never find my emails on Mac. Even worse if they're organized in folders. I just want a universal search: contains text, sort by age, I don't care about other filters....
This doesn't really make Apple look better, but a huge part of it is surely how recent the Ublock Origin app for iOS is. New apps take time to propagate and become good responses. Which makes sense, you wouldn't want someone else to be able to instantly cover Ublock Origin itself with a copycat app (not that it doesn't happen anyway).
Honestly, even Google search with "terms reddit" is better than Reddit's own built-in search. That says a lot.
Same deal on may mac. Unless I know the exact file name, Finder search is useless. Spotlight will happily surface a PDF from 2017 before showing the text file you saved yesterday.
Which brings me to the question: why is search so hard?
Why use an app store. Is Apple more trustworthy than the author of this app. Think about it
The company continues to increase its advertising services revenue. In terms of protecting computer buyers from advertising and associated surveillance, one could reason that its interests are conflicted
App store "search" has always been a joke. It has never been suitable for app "discovery". The company would rather computer owners select from lists of recommended apps
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I too get the same for Mac apps, but for iOS apps still see the same competitor results returned first.
For me, that's the same whether I use the App Store from my phone, or laptop.
I needed to add search to my own website. I wanted it to be local search (the titles for the documents are all available locally). I tried several different popular 1000s of stars JavaScript search libraries. All but one failed on simple searches. Like if the title was "See Spot Run to the Park" and my search was "Park" or "Run" this title would not be listed as a result and titles with neither word would appear. I reported the issues, they were ignored as "working as intended". Not sure why anyone uses these libraries. I suspect they don't actually test. The plug them in, it appears to work at a glance, and they ship it.
I'm talking about Fuse.js, FlexSearch.js, etc.... I don't remember which other ones I tried but was shocked out bad the results were
no. At a glance it appears to be create an index at site build time. That's not what I needed. I needed to search user document titles (different for every user). Those document titles are synced to local storage. So not a build time thing
Same. It never used to show them. It only started recently. But it's only partially letting some ads through. Youtube video ads are still blocked which is good.
Some commenters are presenting a conspiracy theory about how Apple is intentionally sabotaging App Store search, perhaps with the goal of maximizing App Store search ad revenue. I think the empirical evidence, covering all examples of Apple search, points to incompetence rather than malice. Money does factor in, but again, not in a conspiratorial way: rather, Apple simply has no monetary incentive to fix their own incompetence. It's complacency rather than conspiracy. This is what happens with monopolies and duopolies: they've already got essentially a captive audience, so they no longer need to put in the effort to compete. They just "phone it in", so to speak.
I don't think that Apple wants a bunch of scams in the App Store. But when developers and users are practically throwing money at Apple, no matter what Apple does or doesn't do, and "services" margins are 70%, there's a great temptation to pocket the profits and shrug.
For another example of how Apple is bad at search, look at the Settings app. Awful. But again, it's not sabotage. That would be silly and pointless. It's just pure and simple incompetence and complacency.
I agree fully about how they have proven their incompetence, but let’s imagine you are a PM there and you pitch a feature “Fixing App Store search using well-known strategies and techniques”
I can’t imagine that especially Tim Cook’s Apple is naive enough to not realize that’s going to dent ad revenue, since most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws. So it seems like that project won’t be approved because your boss and their boss are going to know that you’ll be losing Apple a ton of sweet, sweet pure-profit revenue if you succeed. If it would make Apple 100 million dollars in profits to fix it, especially for a neatly encapsulated problem like App Store, where it wouldn’t be that disruptive to just rip and replace the search engine, Apple would just fix it.
All the Mac and iPhone search incompetence, it’d be revenue neutral to fix, and not lend itself to flashy advertising like “liquid glass” does, so that’s why that’ll never happen.
> most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws.
I wouldn't say it's because of the flaws. It's because of the design: regardless of how well search works, the top hit is always an ad. At best, even with search working perfectly, a search for your own app would return your app as the #2 hit at highest. The search ad system still incentivizes developers to buy ads for searches of their own app, if only as a defensive measure to prevent other developers from inserting their apps at the #1 spot. And Apple makes money, and you pay money, if App Store users click on your own ad for your own app at the #1 spot rather than the "free" search result at the #2 spot.
Oh yeah, and you can't block App Store search ads with an ad blocker. Consider how the App Store is entirely native and has no web-based purchases or downloads.
I hear you, and agree that is true. But consider this angle:
Without buying an ad, but with a competent organic search:
Customer searches "Ublock origin". Results: (This is actually a real life test)
1. (Ad) Adblock Pro for Safari
Note: The rest are actual organic "results"!
2. Brave Browser & Search Engine (WTF?)
3. Ublock: Ad Blocker, Speed Test
4. Firefox Focus: Privacy Browser
5: Same as #1 but organic
6: AdGuard
I gave up trying to find actual Ublock Origin Lite in these results, but I did install it on my phone earlier so it must be in there somewhere.
A working search would have Ublock Origin Lite as #2 after the ad. If I'm Ublock Origin Lite, I might be satisfied with this and trust that anyone who isn't too easily distracted should be able to find me right there above the fold. So I'd be less likely to buy an ad than I am in our real world. #2 isn't as good as #1, but it's good enough for a lot of people. Combine this with not allowing people to infringe trademarks in their keywords or whatever shenanigans is going on above, and the App Store would be a lot less of a scamware cesspool. And boy, do scams pay well!
Apple Podcast search never fails to enrage me. There's no way to search within a specific show, just all your followed shows at once. Even if you know the exact episode title, if it has common words in it, you'll get a stream of garbage. It treats any match in the episode description with the same weight as an exact match of the episode title. So I have to go on the web, search the specific podcast to figure out the date, then just scroll to it in Apple Podcasts.
I wonder if this has survived the recent cutbacks to USAID?
And recently they are celebrating some big news on the lead fighting front: This week, UNICEF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced a new $150 million initiative to combat lead poisoning
"It is long overdue that the world is coming together," says Samatha Power <https://www.usaid.gov/organization/samantha-power>, who runs USAID.
That is a 404. And the homepage has a Notification of Administrative Leave
As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally (...)
Wonderfully, the official government webpage[1] lists his duties as:
Larry spends his days greeting guests to the house, inspecting security defences and testing antique furniture for napping quality. His day-to-day responsibilities also include contemplating a solution to the mouse occupancy of the house. Larry says this is still ‘in tactical planning stage’.
It seems wrong that each individual sysadmin human in Space X would need to (a) login to my device remotely, and (b) require individual credentials to do so.
Having some way to remotely push updates, and having some kinda of (preferably with your consent!) remote access might be reasonable, but I would expect that to be via some kind of intermediate gateway/app/something and not direct from a sysadmin’s individual account.
I too would have asked the same question as GP, and also meant it genuinely.
It feels like HN is a place where someone could summarise the (presumably strong) arguments against this? Or links to a good source as suggested by a sibling comment.
Our Hyundai is extremely reliable. I can only remember a single issue with it. The adaptive cruise seemed to get overwhelmed in Chicago and disabled itself.
By contrast, I have some electrical gremlin with my 2021 Ford nearly every day. Back up sensor fails to work, main screen doesn’t turn on, digital odometer doesn’t turn on, power train throws errors, mirrors don’t unfold, etc, etc. it all tends to resolve itself quickly and isn’t more than an annoyance, but it sure kills my confidence in that vehicle.
This was a regular court process, with an independent judge and jury. It’s just the prosecution was run directly by the post office and not the public prosecutor.
It still had very bad outcomes, and clearly with the prosecution not being independent enough, but it wasn’t an entirely closed process.
It's not quite regular. Normally, the (purported) victim and the prosecutor are not the same person. That's another thing that has been highlighted by this case: the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself, rather than them being prosecuted independently by the Crown Prosecution Service.
> the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself
Any private citizen or business in the UK has a right to prosecute crimes. It just costs a lot of money, so you can imagine how it's used (spoiler: large companies/wealthy individuals against poor people).
The Crown Prosecution Service also has the power to take over a case that is being prosecuted privately, and if they decide to take no further action on it, then the person/company that was doing the private prosecution no longer can.
The CPS also "successfully" prosecuted some cases based on the same evidence. If your key complainants are fabricating evidence that looks solid to a jury, separation of powers is not going to save you from the power of the state.
As I said in a related comment: if I looked hard enough, I imagine I'd also be able to find similar miscarriages of justice in the USA, too.
The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.
Whereas a generic prosecutor has a bunch of cases of reports from victims that are not related to them, and thus if a case is not sufficiently strong, they'd normally just pick another case where the evidence is strong. They also have the responsibility to independently review the evidence from victims and police. These procedural checks didn't apply in the post office cases.
The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.
> The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.
I know what they wrote.
> The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.
I pointed out the CPS itself also prosecuted cases based on the bad evidence provided to them, so the procedural checks also did nothing.
I think we're basically on the same page, diverging only on speculative items.
Do note that the fact that CPS prosecuted cases does not mean the CPS didn't throw out dubious cases. We only know the ones they did prosecute, but we don't know how many (if any) they did not prosecute. As I said, this is speculation.
I also speculate that if you send hundreds of fraud cases to the CPS they might be suspicious why the rate of criminal fraud among the post office workers is so high.
I agree there's no evidence that the "private" prosecutions made things worse, but it surely didn't help, and deprived the system of an opportunity (whether it would have been taken or not) to prevent the miscarriages in the first place.
Honestly, the fact the Post Office were marking their own homework almost certainly made everything worse, in my opinion. I’m just taking issue with the idea that it was the sole cause, as we similar things happen under different systems, too.
Clearly you do not, as I made no complaint; but merely pointed out how it wasn't quite the regular court process that tomalpha said it to be, and pointed out another thing that has been highlighted by the case. As it has been. A lot more people know this about Post Office Ltd than used to, and it is oft-discussed when the subject comes up.
Post Office Ltd is not "the state". At least nominally. It was privatized at the turn of the 21st century. As I just said, one of the things that this has highlighted for people is that a private company has a normal practice of pursuing criminal prosecutions (for fraud in this case) privately, rather than via the Crown Prosecution Service which is normal practice for almost every other private company or organization when it comes to criminal matters.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/toot-sweet_adv?tl=true