Original post by David Meyer via GIGAOM
Analytics startup Adeven suggested earlier this week that two-thirds of App Store was pretty much invisible to most users, leaving the apps unranked and hardly downloaded.
The company said, somewhat controversially, that Apple’s app search was lacking, leaving users largely dependent on Top 25 lists that tend to reflect the size of the developer’s marketing budget more than they do relevance to the users’ needs.
It’s not the first time someone has highlighted a problem here. Indeed, there are a few companies trying to target a perceived need for app discovery. Appsfire and Quixey spring to mind, as – of course – does Chomp, which Apple bought earlier this year.
But another service that has been gearing up for around two years is Berlin-based Xyologic, whose Xyo service went into closed beta on Thursday (you can request an invite here).
Xyologic’s big selling point is the way its technology classifies apps into relatively specific genres – a strategy that it says makes it possible to understand even vaguely-expressed search queries. In a recent blog post, the firm said its work so far has shown:
- only five percent of app search queries are for specific usage functions.
- a similar amount are for specific app names.
- the vast majority are category searches.
