Hi Martin, Thank you very much for your reply. :)
I checked out the article you referred to in your post and it looks great. I'd love to see that implemented in the store. Given the fact that I can't help out myself, how long do you think will it take you to get that set up? I know you're quite busy at the moment but as an app developer whose app "currently suffers from its popularity" I find that quite important. Thanks again, Niklas 2015-04-09 14:38 GMT+02:00 Martin Albisetti <[email protected]>: > On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 5:50 AM, Niklas Wenzel > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks for bringing this up! > I completely agree that the current sorting is naive at best and it is > not intended to be the way we sort search results at all, just a > convenient way to get us bootstrapped. > > > > To me it seems that we agree we should improve the sorting algorithm. I > > acknowledge the problem of having no way to deal with unfair reviews but > I > > believe this should overall be separated from the sorting problem, even > > though a better sorting mechanism might relativise some bad reviews. > > > > Until now, we've had two suggestions: the Bayesian average and the > solution > > mentioned by Selene, where each app would get a 3 star rating by default > > which would be adjusted later when people start reviewing the > application. > > In my opinion these are pretty good solutions, with each of them having > > their individual advantages or disadvantages. > > The Bayesian average tries to predict what would happen if plenty of > people > > were asked to rate the app but apps without bad reviews only still rank > > better than those without any reviews. > > Selene's method solves the latter, but depending on the implementation it > > might be disadvantageous for apps with few reviews. It would be nice to > see > > a code example here. Selene, is your music player open source? > > There are a lot of good points about people gaming the system and > problems with different approaches. Luckily, this is not a new problem > at all. In fact, it's not even new to Ubuntu! Matthew Paul Thomas > spent some time thinking about this years ago and put together a great > wiki page[1]. > Which points to a great post on how to avoid the most common problems: > http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html > We also plan to add in other metrics over time that are harder to > game: # of downloads normalised by download date, retention (how many > people keep it installed?), usage (opt-in feature to let the store > know how often the app is used), quality (number of crashes) and > others. To try and avoid loops where apps get more downloads because > they started off higher on the list, climbing up higher and making it > harder for new or less well-known apps to surface, we'll likely > introduce a small amount of serendipity into the search results, > occasionally returning something high on the list that might not > normally make it. > So yes, we will improve this soon and improve it iteratively over > time, I expect us to be working on this on and off as long as the > store exists. > > > > My next question: I'd love to help implement the new ranking mechanism. > Is > > the code for the app store backend available somewhere so that I can > > retrieve and modify it? If not, who is the person to talk to? > > Unfortunately this piece isn't open source. The obscurity of how > search results are (will be) sorted in this case will help make it > harder to game the system by developers, making it a bit of a better > experience for users. > A bit down the line, though, we might be able to open up some amount > of data and have a contest to improve sorting, similar to what Netflix > has done in the past[2]. > > In the mean time we'll soon improve the sorting a bit to get us > through this next phase of growth, which is a fantastic problem to > have :) > > > [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter/RatingsAndReviews > [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize > > -- > Martin >
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