Comment by ajscherer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajscherer | Hacker News Reader

But curated directories didn't end up working for the Web and they won't end up working for mobile application discovery, either

This sums up my thoughts on the issue. Does anyone have a good reason why curation works better than search for mobile apps, but the opposite situation holds for web apps?

Couldn't Google give every app on the marketplace a website and just use the regular PageRank as part of App search? I have always felt like the Android app discovery process should start at google.com, and I think links from friends and online forums would immediately become the most common way to find good apps. Why pay people to do what the web could do for you?

Also, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible for someone to create a "better" (louder / faster / more sophomoric) fart app than what already exists on the App store. Is Apple ceding those farts to Android? Or would they make an exception for a really good fart App?

>Does anyone have a good reason why curation works better than search for mobile apps, but the opposite situation holds for web apps?

Web content is (relatively) static and indexable. It's essentially all "media".

Applications are not. Developing an algorithm that can deduce what an application does so it can be searched for is essentially a version of the halting problem, and even approximation pretty much requires "strong AI" to get even remotely close on all applications.

Thus, application directories must include a form for the developer to fill out to be searchable at all. Allowing the developers alone to control this means false information is too easy to spread, so curating steps in to weed out as much as possible.

As to ranking, yeah. A PageRank clone makes sense.

I was going into a whole long comment on why search doesn't work for apps (no hyperlinks, web pages don't cost money to visit), but the whole thing is a bit of a red herring. Apple is not using curation to make finding apps easier. It's using curation to set a minimum bar for entry. Google is using search to find the most relevant web pages, not to find the worst web pages (which is a much harder, if not impossible, search).

Apple does need a good search so I can find the apps I want. (I think this is usually the case. Being unable to find an app hasn't been a problem.) But having a good search is a different question than "should apps be filtered for buggy, malicious, or useless apps?"

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