Saturday, June 23, 2012

What's wrong with Search in Google Play

What's wrong with the search in Google Play ?

Yesterday, I was looking for something in my sliding tile puzzle called 'Nature Puzzle'.
So I opened Google Play website, and started with a search for 'Nature Puzzle'.

Here is the result :












We have :
* Photo Puzzle Game, NumberPuzzle,
* Nature Puzzles,
* Nature Puzzle,
* Natural Seasons,
* Zoo and Nature Puzzle 2 in 1
* kids Puzzle:Animal

and my game is not listed !

What I don't understand is that I gave the exact name, and I didn't find it !
I looked at the last app (kids Puzzle Animal ) more closely, and there is only 1 occurence of 'natural' in the description.
And the application called 'Nature Puzzle' ( so with the exact same name as mine ), it has the same rating, and less downloads.

Note that
* I'm not complaining here that my application does not have enough visibility : I only published it as a proof of concept of Html5 android applications
* I'm not asking the description of the search algorithms in the Google Play Store !

I'm just amazed that, from a customer point of view, giving the exact name of an application does not bring this application to the top !


Actually, if I specify that I want to search only in Android apps, then my game appears at the 7th rank :


















I even discovered another application named 'Nature Puzzle' ( it now sounds like a very common name ), that is even more badly ranked than mine !


Am I the only one to found it strange ?
Do you feel like there are some reasons, for the customer, not to put the application with the exact name first in the search results ?
Do you understand how the ranking is done ?

7 comments:

Wolfram Rittmeyer said...

Well I can understand that you are annoyed. It indeed is strange.

But you can search for the exact name. And it's - unsurprisingly - the same way as you would in Google: By using quotes: "Nature Puzzle".

The problem is, that most users probably don't know about this. I also often forget to use quotes when I use for something I already know by name.

Apart from this, I think that the Playstore has way too few filter possibilities.

I think what is mostly needed is a search limited to some category: Try searching for english vocabulary apps - it get's crazy fast.

Adrian said...

This is how google behaves to show the customer ths best "user experience". So google show on top the most releveant - most dowloaded and expensive app. Or a mixture out of this.

Anonymous said...

The issue is that your app is not native, so it doesn't get featured.

Anonymous said...

The problem is that your app is not native.

Anonymous said...

The problem is that your app is not native.

AndroidBlogger said...

@anonymous :

I don't think being native or HTML5 change anything to the way the app is featured !

Unknown said...

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