Ok guys I am being really annoyed by google’s play store search functionality, because I have published my game Asteroid Buster, with a free ad supported version, and I have literally titled the free version as “Asteroid Buster Free Version”.
You can see it here but hang on before you grab your device and surely download and read below:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.NinjeticStudios.AsteroidBusterReboot
On my phone I get on the play store. I search “Asteroid Buster”. So I do not see my game appear in the higher part of the list, which I can expect since the game has < 50 downloads and has only been out briefly so I think ok, no big deal, probably just in the top fifty atleast. But no, my game doesn’t actually appear (today) until wayyyy down to good old number 159!
Mannnnn, these are so called search results? Google has obviously changed the formula a lot since a couple years ago when I last put a game up - because I used to see my games listed first, even when relatively low downloads and age when I search for the name or close to the name in the store listing…
So I change the search to the whole exact name as its listed: “Asteroid Buster Free Version” in hopes that being the whole title as it is listed in the play store, that I will certainly find the game quickly within what… the top twenty?..
No…155…
How can this be? These are not the top new free sections, not a super vague search term. This is something very specific to only a single app, and to any other it would be only vaguely related, probably with the word “buster” ever in the description… its the exact title name as it would appear in this search! Why would they change the algorithm to be so - popularity based… if you use the actual name of a game? This seems so crazy to me, because I definitely am not going to tell somebody to “just search the play store” for my game - yeah right and have them whip the screen up for a minute and a half to find my icon… maybe???
Anybody have any idea what I am doing wrong? Is it just so dependent on popularity at this point I am screwed for telling people to search me by title? I feel like first priority of a search should be to find the most relevant, specific thing that the user has entered, not an army of ‘popular titles’ only vaguely similar to the search terms (often only a single term, like “asteroid” seems to really grab many). Is the only solution to poor search results to get enough downloads to push the popularity of the app up the list? That is so backwards if so, because how do you even get word of mouth results when they can’t easily find your app even if they know exactly what they are looking for (and they almost never know exactly what the icon will look like…)