Hacker News Reader

Comment by kolinko | Hacker News Reader

I bet this is because of the App Store SEO. The way search works is that if a user types in "Camera" in the search field, the first apps that come up on top are the ones that are called simply "Camera[+non-letter-chars]". Even if Facebook's Camera had a gazillion downloads, it would end up below apps called "Camera+++", just because of the name.

By changing the name from "Facebook Camera" to "Camera•" the company is guaranteed to position on top of the search for the phrase "Camera", and get even more downloads. And once they changed it to "Camera•" in the App Store it only made sense to change the name to "Camera•" on the device, to maintain consistency in the naming.

(disclaimer: I'm the founder of AppCod.es, and we've analysed the details of Apple's search engine in detail :) )

View on HN

Thanks for sharing that tidbit. I'm excited to wake up tomorrow to see that †‡‰∞$Competitor^♡❤♥ has blasted up the charts...

you mean, like this: http://imgur.com/rIYmO

?:)

Thank goodness for Apple's curation.

I've been complaining about this for forever.

Hopefully, guys from Chomp will get this fixed within a year.

Company name I think is weighted higher than title of the app. I remember for a while the top game in the free section was made by a company called "Top Free Angry Zombies" or something like that. That's when you know App Store discovery is broken.

I believe it's weighted just as high as the name & in-app purchase names, but still far higher than the keywords.

As for the company name, I believe you're talking about "Angry Zombie Kids Apps & Doodle Zombiez Birds Jump Gun Games" (true name).

Fortunately you can change company name only once, so this is limited. But still..

I don't think your SEO theory is right, the screenshot shows it being sorted after Camera+, and the actual ascii value of • is in the extended (>127) portion so its likely to be sorted after almost any other permissible character.

The screenshot shows iPhone app search (apps in the phone, sorted alphabetically), not the app store search.

Having said that, I've just tested my theory, and it seems that they didn't change their App Store name: it's still "Facebook Camera", and it still shows below apps like "Camera-" which has just a handful of downloads.

That's quite interesting. Are there particular sorting rules for those non-letter characters? Why is + before •?

When you order by name it's what esrauch said.

As for the sorting in the App Store, Apple strips all the non-letter characters, and orders apps which match the search query according to their download numbers.

So, if "Camera+" had 100k downloads, and "Camera!" had 10k downloads, "Camera+" will be above "Camera!" in the App Store search. There are some more rules explained in this slideshare: http://slideshare.net/kolinko/app-store-seo-tutorial

Each character has a numerical value that is fairly standardized as ASCII or Unicode. Typically + maps to 43, a to 97 (b to 98, c to 99, ...) and • to 149 and will be sorted in that order.

That's a bit of a simplification; often times more sophisticated orderings are used, especially with consideration to internationalization.

Yes but apple doesn't use that. See kolinko's comment.

For more information, the appropriate search term is "collation" -- ordering words and terms according to the rules of an alphabet, case sensitivity, accent sensitivity...

Thank you for citing your experience for credibility purposes. :)

Of course :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com