Recently we noticed that searching for an app by name seemed to reliably show us an ad at the top of the page for a competitor. Paying even closer attention, we were able to reproduce this several times.

Talk about jarring - just look how often you can search for an app by name and the first result is obscured by an ad for a competing product!

Take a look at these examples above; searching for "Lyft" shows me Uber first, and searching for "Uber" shows me Lyft first. Talk about maddening!

These are examples of companies with many ad dollars to spend, but I'm just as confused why searching for "Uber" wouldn't show an ad for Uber at the top? Seems a bit misleading to users, and hurtful to app developers as well.

What are your thoughts?