Google: search for an application | Hacker News Reader

Google: search for an application

google.com

56 pointsantimora17 comments

Seems to work a lot better than google play's search, which returns absolutely awful results. Searching for New York travel guide in google play will return travel guides for Paris, Rome etc...

Sadly it just seems to be aggregating a number of spammy download sites. Searching in my product category turns up pages on CNet, Brothersoft, etc but no original developer sites.

It would appear that they've targeted know distribution systems, with Play and the App Store being the obvious choices.

Some SEO Suggestions, if this is related to something you are distributing. Look into somehow implementing Rich Snippets [1]. Also, Schema.org [2]

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

[2] http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html

11,100,000 results for "twitter" now that is scary.

The idea is good but having application aggregators such as download.cnet.com, softpedia.com and others in the result means a lot of duplicate entries.

Once you get to page 34, the true number is revealed (like in normal search).

> Page 37 of 362 results

I always find it curious how the true number is only revealed at some page that almost nobody normally visits.

This will be handy for https://starthq.com - a web app directory I launched the other week.

One piece of feedback I've received is that people prefer to use a native mobile app if one is available, so the plan is to include links to app stores on the app pages. Unfortunately, none of the app stores offer APIs for retrieving apps based on keywords.

Apple offers a search API for the iTunes store: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentati...

Are you saying it can't search on keywords? I find that sort of shocking.

From what I understand with Apple you need to specify the country in which you're searching and you may get different results for the same query based on that. There isn't a way to get back a single link to which you could redirect all users that want to download the iOS app, regardless of where they are from.

Edit: so yes, I was wrong to say "none", but Apple has its own set of issues making it difficult to do

Nice, my application which is not even on page one in Google Play search appears as the first result for the same keyword in Google Applications.

I wonder what this means for https://www.quixey.com/

Shameless plug: We've got lightning-fast iOS app search on Appsfire. Apps sorted by relevance and quality (using our own App Score) http://getap.ps/appsfire

We're not there with Android yet, though.

For Android we've built AppBrain (which is also included in the Google application search engine).

Works well when I search Chinese keywords

No windows apps?

Their PageRank may be too low.

If you click on "Search tools" you can filter by OS. Surprisingly very few Windows apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com