7 ms·

I noticed the same with the search results in the Google Play Store. When you use search to try to find an app that matches your search term, you almost always

by binkHN 3y ago

I noticed the same with the search results in the Google Play Store. When you use search to try to find an app that matches your search term, you almost always get very unrelated apps in the results, and the only good explanation to it is that the unrelated apps that you're seeing provide more revenue to Google in comparison to the actual app that you want.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Or the "unrelated" apps have bought ads on a wide range of keywords so that they appear in many search results? Like when I search Craigslist for a BMW car and see ads for Mercedes and Audi cars because people posting those ads stick "BMW" in their ad copy. I flag those ads on the basis that they are abusing the search algorithm.
- binkHN 3y ago
  I'd love to say the unrelated apps bought ads, but that's not the case. The Play Store clearly denotes when there's an ad in your search results, but the vast majority of the unrelated apps have no ads.
StillBored 3y ago
How much of that is just the vendors putting keywords in their search match dialogs to broaden their scope? The example I used to hit all the time, was searching for RDP in apple/android/etc app market spaces, the first few hits aren't even capable of RDP and are 3rd parties selling their proprietary screen sharing app rather than actual RDP clients. The app stores seem to have equated RDP or VNC with "screen sharing" and say ~80% of the results don't even support the protocol in question. Although, without my phone handy I just dumped it into the web based interface and it actually returned a half dozen RDP clients at the top, but then in the second ten, was netflix, facebook, ms teams and various other apps completely unrelated to even screen sharing. Looks like if you pay enough you can show up in every single query.
eitland 3y ago
Same happens in Apple App Store BTW: The first result in the results page is never what I search for. It is possibly just an ad but I can't remember it being market as one and it feels very off in what is supposed to be a premium paid offering as opposed to Googles ad financed ecosystem.

by binkHN 3y ago

SoftTalker 3y ago

Or the "unrelated" apps have bought ads on a wide range of keywords so that they appear in many search results? Like when I search Craigslist for a BMW car and see ads for Mercedes and Audi cars because people posting those ads stick "BMW" in their ad copy. I flag those ads on the basis that they are abusing the search algorithm.

binkHN 3y ago
I'd love to say the unrelated apps bought ads, but that's not the case. The Play Store clearly denotes when there's an ad in your search results, but the vast majority of the unrelated apps have no ads.

StillBored 3y ago

How much of that is just the vendors putting keywords in their search match dialogs to broaden their scope? The example I used to hit all the time, was searching for RDP in apple/android/etc app market spaces, the first few hits aren't even capable of RDP and are 3rd parties selling their proprietary screen sharing app rather than actual RDP clients. The app stores seem to have equated RDP or VNC with "screen sharing" and say ~80% of the results don't even support the protocol in question. Although, without my phone handy I just dumped it into the web based interface and it actually returned a half dozen RDP clients at the top, but then in the second ten, was netflix, facebook, ms teams and various other apps completely unrelated to even screen sharing. Looks like if you pay enough you can show up in every single query.

eitland 3y ago

Same happens in Apple App Store BTW: The first result in the results page is never what I search for. It is possibly just an ad but I can't remember it being market as one and it feels very off in what is supposed to be a premium paid offering as opposed to Googles ad financed ecosystem.