Apple Acquires Chomp; App Store Search And Discovery To Be Completely Revamped | Hacker News Reader

Apple Acquires Chomp; App Store Search And Discovery To Be Completely Revamped

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168 pointsrkudeshi41 comments

I really hope this means there will be a better way to find games. When I search for "rpg", what I really want is an old school RPG game, you know, where you kill monsters, solve quests and get XP points. Instead, I get a massive amount of MMORPG's (which are not really RPG's at all), and "Do you want to be Chris Brown" applications.

On the same token, when I search for "adventure" games, I really want to find games like Sam & Max or Monkey Island. Instead, I see a whole bunch of kids games, and at best, "find a hidden object" games. Not what I want at ALL.

http://rpg-site.com/ and http://toucharcade.com/category/games/adventure/ help, but they still miss a lot of stuff.

Edit: tried out Chomp, it doesn't help. This problem would be ridiculously easy to solve with letting users tag apps

"This problem would be ridiculously easy to solve with letting users tag apps"

Are you sure? That would be abused for SEO in about two nanoseconds.

IMHO, the app store has too few categories to put apps in. A richer taxonomy would be better.

Also only works if the tags match up to your expectations. It's easy to imagine a perfect world where every old school RPG is tagged with old-school-rpg but that doesn't really seem likely.

"solve with letting users tag apps"

That just leads to Shady Developers Ltd. hiring Shady Astroturfers, Inc. to spam tags on his competitors.

this is a solveable problem. i've done it, in fact.

In a situation where the stakes were basically limited to reputation and informational content perhaps, but not with serious money on the line. When tag-turfing can swing thousands of dollars an hour I have less hope that the host can outwit all of the possible parasite variations.

The perception was that the data was being fed into search engines. So I think the stakes were similarly high.

http://www.quixey.com/search?q=rpg&platform=2004

http://www.quixey.com/search?q=old+school+RPG&platform=2...

On behalf of all app developers: oh, hell yes.

Yep. I'm really hopeful that this will result in some good marketing avenues for my apps. Here's hoping!

Exactly, this is so needed. As it is now unless it's in the top 100 it does not exist.

well - it depends on the category. For games/entertainment this is true, but for productivity etc, a good SEO can make a big difference ( http://www.slideshare.net/kolinko/app-store-seo-tutorial )

That's true, but their search ranking is weird and kind of broken right now (e.g. company name is indexed; descriptions aren't). It would be great if that got overhauled.

How many times did you bought a new app you discovered through Genius? That's why.

I can see how it’s better (the performance is awesome, searching in iTunes is just sooo damn slow, inflexible and no fun) and it has some cool but obvious tools. I’m just wondering why Apple needs to buy them. Can they really not just copy that?

Talent acquisition?

And submarining Android app discovery doesn't hurt.

True! With Chomp gone, where will Google find experts in search?

You can laugh, but Android Market search is horrible.

You say that, but android market place search is embarrassing.

Perhaps look in the basement of the SPYW department?

I came here to say how nice of Apple not just bluntly copying Chomp (you know, like widgets, Safari Reader and notifications)...

I don’t think it’s possible to bluntly copy Chomp (if you stay away from copying their aesthetics). All the stuff they do is pretty obvious and standard. It’s only special because the App Store search is so terrible.

To me a performance upgrade would be the most valuable thing, I don’t think anyone would claim Apple copied Chomp when their search suddenly performs better.

But why reinvent the wheel? They saw something they liked, they thought it was better to buy the technology, so they did. Good for Apple and good for Chomp!

http://blog.arc90.com/2010/06/07/safari-5-another-step-towar...

(last paragraph links to: http://twitter.com/chrisdary/status/15672452287)

I hope 'search gigant' Google will fix their discovery system; I find the Android store results, at least for what I search for, biased towards big publishers on the one side and total crap on the other. Usually I use google.com to discover apps and after that I find them in the Market, not the other way around as it should be (find app => search for reviews online). It seems weird that I have to do it like that. In the Appstore I never had that problem.

Same with promotion of my games/apps => Appstore gives you a lot more 'credit' (for lack of a better word) as indie/starter than Market seems to do. Ofcourse the one (inability to discover what you want/need) creates the other (low downloads/sales).

Not sure if that's a glitch on my part somehow, but in the indie communities I 'hang', almost everyone has the same issues.

Oh great. So now what am I going to use to search for new apps in Android?

This is an interesting development, where better search/discovery technology gets acquired and (hopefully) integrated into the main platform. Apple was able to acquire a company with proven technology, because Apple provides plenty of hooks for third party services to allow them to innovate much faster on search/discovery technologies than iTunes itself can.

Unfortunately for Android Apple is way ahead of Google here, with the iTunes store having an affiliate model for all paid apps, and ways to get the actual appstore listings programmatically. AppBrain and other services that want to provide Android app discovery services have to go through a painful process of getting information about Android apps, and even then it's nearly impossible to know whether a particular app will be available to a certain phone model X running in country Y. In addition, there is no direct way to monetize the leads that can be generated through good discovery algorithms. It's ironic how the more iTunes store in this sense is more open than the Android market.

I was going to launch something similar http://www.appstoretools.com as a fun little side project this weekend... But if Chomp is worth $50M, maybe "side project" is not the right way to think of it?

Their team size was 20. Clearly it wasn't a side project.

I just tried Chomp.

The sorting makes no sense, looks to be hand-edited or possibly paid for by the apps, and the current App Store sort seems to be better to me.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong part of Chomp? Which section do people like?

I agree the sorting right now is crap. I think the idea is that right now chomp cannot grab internal data to sort things, so the idea is to combine the data available on Apple's internal side with some of chomp's concepts and technology. The other thing is that it removes chomp search for Android which makes the gap between Android and iOS app market even larger.

What the App store needs is recommendations like Amazon. I'd spend way more money, like I do at Amazon =)

It has 'Genius' for App discovery, which recommends apps based on previous purchases. It's well hidden and not very good.

I'm curious as to how helpful "Genius" is for you. If I've already bought a to-do app, for example, the odds of me wanting to buy another one are pretty small. And yet, that seems to be the kind of thing that "Genius" always recommends - more of the same kind of app I've already bought.

awesome, finally Apple is going to improve app discovery, because that sucked pretty much. Here's a blogpost I wrote about what Apple should do with the App Store: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3628073

50 MILLION! Sheesh.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/chomp-chomp...

I'm really excited to see what Apple comes out with on this. Any thoughts on how long this might take Apple to actually implement any changes to the system?

I think something like Amazon's or Netflix's similar products would be great.

Kevin Rose was an investor in Chomp, IIRC. Good for him.

Is this basically better search technology?

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