The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant | Hacker News Reader

The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant

appoftheday.com

88 pointsjsatok60 comments

I just want to point out, re: all these "instant" things, Google instant is useful not because its instant, but because its finishing queries for you.

Partial queries are not useful.

My 2cents

I agree with you. I didn't build App Store Instant as a replica of Google Instant. With the APIs available, there isn't a reliable way to predict apps.

I built it because iTunes is slow. Try searching iTunes and clicking on an App (to read the description). It takes me 5+ seconds. This takes ~1 second.

Yea not this specifically, just in general.

Are you logging your queries? If you have enough searches you could build your own predictions. You're also proxying results, so you could use those to build an index too.

I am logging queries. Do you have any tips/suggestions as to how to do my own predictions?

For each prefix, which app are people eventually satisified with?

E.g. if "in" often leads to instapaper, predict that, while if "ins" often eventually leads to "instantapp", that's the prediction for that prefix.

What we really need is a better app store interface on the iPad. Apple's implementation is terrible[1]. AppShopper shows it would be possible to do. I'd even pay money for such an app. The app could include "spotlight apps" too, as another source of revenue.

[1] It is terrible because it always resets itself to the beginning everytime you launch it. Couple that with the fact that installing an app causes the app store to close, means you just can't search around very effectively on it. Simple example: navigate to the third page of top apps, find an app you like, install it, go back to the app store, you've been pushed back to the first page and have to redrill down to page three to keep perusing.

Agreed. Browsing is especially difficult when you click on an app to find out more details about it, click back when you're done, and then find that you've been kicked back to page one.

Unfortunately I think this is one of the places where you're likely to get rejected by Apple for 'duplicating built in functionality', even if you've improved upon it, so I doubt anyone is going to do it

Agreed.

I have 'instant' overload.

Time for a 'slow search' movement to go with 'slow food' and 'slow news'!

I have been wanting to do a slowfeed movement for years

Assuming you're not simply being facetious, what would that look like?

Some sort of meta-rss feed that delivers a 'best-of' for weekend perusal? Perhaps it could be collated/curated and then printed in a handy offline version for weekend digestion?

what would that look like?

http://hackermonthly.com/

It would look much different than "best of".

I imagine the principles to be

1. Look for weak signals (i.e. some random post about some random subject area)

2. Monitor to see whether it gains traction up slowly but surely (i.e. not your typical HN burst algo but something that might be months or years to pick up)

3. Deliver to user before it peaks but after it has reached some momentum.

My friend built http://ytsloth.com as a parody of my http://ytinstant.com.

I'm going to make an instant instant searcher - it instantly searches for searches that instantly search.

http://macournoyer.com/instantinstant/ not quite the same thing, but an instant search for instant searches.

Hah, that's great. That's exactly what I was saying :)

Instant is good, but suddenly everyone's making everything instant instant now this ain't as interesting.

or do we really need everything to be instant?

The JavaScript (and a bit of the CSS) looks awfully similar to iTunes Instant which was released a few days ago: http://labs.stephenou.com/itunes

Edit: according to a few people I've heard from, Stephen (creator of iTunes Instant) did help out / supply some of the code for App Store Instant. My mistake. :)

Although I've got "instant overload" too this is the first of the instant apps with a built in, scalable business model - each of the links on this site is iTunes / linksynergy affiliate enabled - that's truly smart :)

Thanks. I'm excited to see how it scales!

Share when you get some data :)

I need to contact you, but your contact us form is not working. Any other way?

jordan (at) appoftheday (dot) com

EDIT: Fixed the contact form, thanks for pointing that out!

FWIW, you may want to test the linksynergy links through a non-US proxy. I implemented linksynergy on our app's marketing site to hopefully glean an extra 5% on the sales, instead we found there was a bug where international users were being dumped into an infinite redirect loop.

The issue occurred a few months ago but after losing a large amount of sales overseas before we tracked down the problem, we decided we would rather have better control over our sales channel than the extra 5%.

It would take us more than 6 months of sales via linksynergy to make back what we lost in the short time the issue was occurring. It's not worth the risk for us.

Also, it would be nice to find search results for iPad apps and to be able to browse beyond the initial 9 apps that are displayed.

Now we just have to wait for an Amazon instant as well. (With affiliate links, too)

I give it 24 hours or so. These things seem to pop-up near instantaneously.

Maybe there is a market for an "instant search" instant search?

www.instantdomainsearch.com has been doing the instant lookup thing for a while.

Not to mention Domize (http://www.domize.com). I remember using them years ago, I still love it. It's funny, since I can't stand Google Instant, but really enjoy Domize, interesting how that works.

http://domai.nr/ too is an instant domains lookup, and is pretty good at it.

The thing that sets this one apart from the others is that it can actually generate revenue (via affiliate links).

Nice idea but worthless results I'm afraid.

"secret of monkey island" - no hit, suggestions have none of these words.

"air video" - no hit, though at least suggestions include air.

"best camera" - ditto.

Was a bug affecting apps that have spaced in them. Fixed!

(Air Video still doesn't show on top when you type Air Video as apparently Apple's iTunes API is ranking Air Mouse Pro higher)

Still appears to be broken.

"Red Laser"

"Better Christmas List"

Both worked for me. Can you try clearing your cache?

Will this be a new hacker news meme or something? Being bored or current search tool on site is slow so I built (Insert Name) Instant.

There are worse memes than actually building something.

It seems to be missing some of the apps that I can find from the itunes store. We Rule isn't showing up. While another of the We series is.

I like the design a lot simple, fast, and calming.

How did you manage to scrap the Apple Store? Are you storing all the apps data locally? I guess it would be a huge overhead to send each of these queries to Apple...

Excellent work! Feature suggestion: iPad / iPhone filtering.

Great suggestion. I thought about doing tabs when building it, but wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Any ideas?

OK, it's not working comprehensively. I think the search term "book" should bring up waaaaay more than the 9 results I'm getting!

It's just a preview of the first 9 results. Apple only returns back a limited number. I need to find a better way of displaying if there are more than the 9 results. Any ideas?

OK, too bad Apple limits it like that. It really kills its usefulness then. Books in the App Store (aside from the ePubs in the iBookstore) is a rat's nest that's hell to wade through on the desktop. An Instant like this would really help with that.

I also have instant overload but I must admit, this is one of the better instant apps I've seen! And no begging for a job. :)

very snappy, well done! it found all but one of my published iPhone apps, and very quickly, like Google Instant. Of course, one huge advantage you have is less traffic. And you've got less to render. You may also be showing more of a cached, less real-time view of what's actually in the store (guess).

I typed in "go" and SmartGo Pro was the first result. Impressive.

Nice, too bad I don't shop the App Store by keyword search.

My game GloSnake isn't showing up :(

When I searched for GloSnake, it showed up briefly and then disappeared. I can't seem to get it to come back again.

(edit) When getting as far as "Glos", it shows up. If I type beyond that, it seems to disappear.

Found a bug in my code. Try searching now!

Appears to be fixed. Nice work :)

My two cents ...

I find the results often unexpected as a result of matching a search term to several app fields. I search the word "instant" and receive AIM as the top result (presumably because AIM is an "instant" messenger application). Same thing occurs due to matching against developer names, causing what I'd consider to be false (or 'less true') matches to show up because the string matches a developer name, and yet matching app names are lower in the match results, even though the string is in the app name--and often the beginning of the app name.

It'd be worthwhile to consider tightening the parameters. I'd wager a typical user performing an instant search is not searching by developer name. I'd further wager an average user is searching by keyword and description less frequently on an 'instant' search than by app name. So perhaps you could try a bit of weighting, pushing X app name matches higher in the results, followed by X description matches, followed by X developer name matches. Perhaps tweak the UI to reflect this.

And, of course, I could be completely wrong and this is all just a matter of my expectations not being fulfilled after searching.

Haha I see your logic.

Guy creates ytinstant.com, gets hired by google.

You create App Store Instant, and (hopefully) get hired by apple.

Ehm, the logic is right there in the headline:

The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant

I'm not supporting the above statement, and the blithe logic it displays, but I can't go along with this, either. If that is as deep as the analysis of motivations goes on Hacker News, none of you should ever be allowed to vote.

I'd love to respond to the below (dead) post and the thoughtful dorks who downvoted me, so might as well reply to myself.

I don't care why he wrote this application. My point is that you can't just say "LOOK HE SAYS WHY RIGHT THERE, THAT'S WHY!" and have any sort of intellectual credibility, unless the intellectual credibility of a third grader is what you're aiming for.

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