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Fnd offers a better way to search the iTunes Store

Fnd is a Web app that provides a quicker, cleaner way to find what you are looking for in iTunes.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
2 min read

Searching through iTunes is the worst. Apple's bloated app is slow to return results, and the results it does return are legion, and far from targeted. There has got to be a better way to find what you are looking for in the iTunes Store. There is, in fact, and it is called Fnd.

Fnd.io
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

Developed by Jeremy Mack and designed by Ryann Pierce, and launched this week, Fnd is a Web app (available at Fnd.io) that provides an easier way to search the iTunes Store. Fnd is like a green Google for iTunes. At the center of the bright, green page is a search bar. Below, a link lets you use Fnd to browse the top charts, with various filters available via pull-down menus.

Fnd returns results more quickly than iTunes does, and it presents results in a streamlined, more digestible layout. Mack told MacStories that Fnd uses Apple's own API and "has no server, it talks directly to the App Store and iTunes from your browser." The result is Fnd finds what you are looking for nearly instantly -- in a fraction of the time it takes iTunes to load search results.

Fnd search results
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

And thanks to Pierce's design efforts, parsing the results of your search in Fnd takes a fraction of the time it would in iTunes. Fnd uses a tab layout, letting you view results across all categories, or filtering by Apps, Music, Movies, TV, Books, Mac, and Podcasts. Switching to one of the filters is nearly instantaneous and each filter provides sub-filters to refine your results further. And on the default All view of a search results page on Fnd, the app smartly lists only two or three results per filter type, with a link to view more of that type.

Fnd on the iPhone
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

Fnd also can integrate itself into your life and apps in a number of useful ways. Tap the hamburger button in the upper-right corner and choose Integration to integrate Fnd into your browser, the Launch Center Pro app for the iPhone or iPad, or Alfred on a Mac. For your browser, Fnd offers two bookmarklets, one to search Fnd from your bookmarks bar and the other to turn an iTunes link into a Fnd link for sharing purposes because no one likes to click on a link and then wait for iTunes to load. And if you use Launch Center Pro on your iPhone or iPad, you can can add a "Search Fnd' or a "Search Fnd by Category" button to the app. Lastly, you can add a Fnd workflow for the Alfred app on a Mac.

Via Cult of Mac