On Aug 11, 12:16 pm, Mike Wolfson <[email protected]> wrote: > Anyone else notice that every thread on this board eventually ends up being > a discussion of all the things that are disastrously wrong with the Android > Market. More important, do you think anyone at Google notices? (...I > already know the answer to that question). >
The better question is - would they consider this a bug? Let me be clear. I am not posting in hopes that someone from Market will read this and "fix" the problem. I'd much prefer to compare notes with other developers to get some ideas of what we can do, if anything, based on the changing landscape. It's unlikely that the Market's objective is "steady income for developers". If the new search algorithm punished 4000 spammers and harmed 20 decent developers, I'd guess Google would call it a win. They can measure click-throughs and scrolling length that we can't - so they have plenty of data to improve their search without any input from us developers. Of course *I* think the search results are wrong if I don't show up in the top three anymore, but the 20-50 apps that show up ahead of me now might disagree. And the end users are seeing some more variety than before, and since they never found my app, they don't know they are settling for something vastly inferior. It's very unlikely that they will revert the search algorithm back to what it was in June. It's far more likely that there will be further changes and their algorithm will become more complex. Back in November, I pretty much had the search algorithm cracked because it was so basic. I could rank for anything I wanted, but of course I had to be selective with only 350 characters. Since December, it's been more challenging but somewhat predictable. For me, searches for my app name have held steady, but the app name is unlikely to be searched if they don't know it exists already. Searches on long tail keywords have also been steady. It is a few of my favorite short tail phrases that have bombed. Traffic from the 'top paid' in category has been about the same. So I need to decide if I should change any of my keyword strategy and balance my time with that vs making my app better or making it more usable or rolling out new in-app products or working on the hundreds of feature requests. Nathan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
