Android search engine poor results is damaging top applications | Hacker News Reader

Android search engine poor results is damaging top applications

google.com

20 pointsespinchi7 comments

Even just as a user, I've noticed this. Discovering good, reputable apps has become more difficult. The best way I've discovered to see a collection of functionally similar apps is to find one app that does close to what I want, then select the "related" link. It gives a much more useful list of apps than searching based on keywords.

Good trick. They are different algorithms, and it looks like the guys working on the search of relevant, similar apps are doing a better job! (I know one of them personally, so I may be biased.)

This issue is getting some coverage in the Register today: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/27/android_market_searc...

A change in the algorithm for the search in the Android market is literally killing top applications, making them very difficult to discover.

It's paradoxical that this comes from the #1 search engine.

We've had a decrease in the number of downloads since 1st July of 50%. Our app cannot be found by its name. This is incredible.

It's paradoxical that this comes from the #1 search engine.

Not the first time something like this has happened. Their Groups search was broken a few years ago as well, and it took some effort to get them to finally fix it: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet/

We launched a new application just when this issue started: our application didn't appear in any search. Then it finally got indexed, and our download rate doubled. From 1st of July, it halved again.

This is a screenshot of our stats, here showing the number of new users per day: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1581166/new%20users%20drop%20after%2...

We didn't even start to monetize it, but it has certainly taken much of the fun off of developing it. This must have been a very big hit on some other developers.

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