Strange ranking of Google Play search for my game... by exact name.

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 :stuck_out_tongue: 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…)

:face_with_spiral_eyes:

1 Like

Try quoting “Asteroid Buster Free Version”. I believe google will mostly ignore the words ‘free’ and ‘version’ just like it ignores ‘or’, ‘and’ and so on for the most part.

To get better results you need to formulate your search terms like a SQL dba would but really, who do you know that’s going to do that? They’ll search for Asteroids or Asteroid Buster and google knows that.

As you’re mainly just gaining game launch and basic programming from this title, I wouldn’t fret too much. I’m a little surprised their aren’t more ‘asteroids’ competitors really and your rank isn’t much lower after all Asteroids or Space Invaders seems to be pretty popular 1st titles.

Google tries to do a balancing act between most downloaded vs new so unless you get consistent downloads it will sink fast. Personally I think new should carry more weight and it does for non-commercial news but SEOs abuse ‘new’ too much for commercial reasons. Oh, I checked, and you have 9 ratings so that will apparently do a lot to get you up to inside the top 200 if it’s a new app, so you’ve done a good job there without buying rating like some companies do.

You should redo the graphics…they are too pixelated if that video is accurate and the control hints shouldn’t be on the screen all the time.

Also the theme of a spaceship asteroids too common if you want to keep the game play but give a new take then change the ship to the planet Earth fixed at the bottom center with a rotating laser cannon or small space ship flying the 180 degree arc of the Earth visible on the screen (to replace moving spaceship) with the asteroids coming from 180 degrees…to spice it up you can add in comets and UFOs. Although honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if that alteration hasn’t been done multiple times already, but maybe not.

You can call it the Kolumbus Kwest, or Eve of the Earth, or something and try to pick good meta tags (e.g. Earth, Invasion, UFO, Alien, Shooter, Space, Asteroid) but not too many so it will be found in Google Play search.

Oh, one more thing, your game write up should not be longer than a printout of your game. LOL, just joking.

That’s probably a good thing though.

Imagine if you made a game called “Angry Birds” and it got millions of downloads and was top of the search results. Then somebody else created a fake game called “Angry Birds” you wouldn’t want that to be top of the search results, so it doesn’t just take into account the name of your game but other factors too.

You guys make some good points. Hopefully things progress with downloads enough to improve the search visibility. Hmm.

Text comparison is one of many weightings used in search results. There are many others in Google seach formulas that determines what sits at the top of the asset store.

I dunno if there is anything I can directly do to effect this much except hope for more downloads. I added translations for the like top 8 languages, hoping to at least appeal to people who couldn’t have read it before… I doubt that will change the english results really. I hate to change the description to include more repeated “key words” as well, because I already loaded a good few in there… hmm I will keep thinking what to try next

If you search for the name in quotes, it comes up as the first choice. If you don’t, that’s just sort of how google search works… it assumes each word is separate and that you’re looking for both asteroids and busters, rather than specifically for an asteroid buster.

When dealing with the play store, Google put’s a lot of emphasis on relevance. Asteroid Buster is ambiguous. It’s not “top down shooter” “Old arcade games” etc. So when you take the two words:

Asteroid

Buster

Google is trying to find the most relevant match for Asteroid as it refers to Buster. Why would Asteroid Buster be more relevant than Asteroid? Especially when Asteroid may have a lot more users?

Asteroid Impacts has over 3300 reviews. Asteroid Busters has 10. Thus, Asteroid Impacts is more relevant.

The reason Google does this is to prevent someone from naming their game “Game” so that it always appears at the top of every search for “game”. Back in the day, people were abusing things like metatags, so Google pretty much threw out anything related to keyword searches and created the idea of content searches.

Hope that helps.

We have noticed the same thing - I can’t reveal the name since it is done for a client, but it did not contain words like “free”. For now it doesn’t appear AT ALL in the search results, and the only way I can find it is by entering the bundle ID in the google play search. Other games are also at place 50-150 when searching by their exact name even though the other apps have different names

To give you an ideal of what google has to contend with:

1609851--97749--$SEO-out-for-a-drink.png

Sounds like they insert a result at a higher ranking than you really have and other titles if they can think you are searching for a particular title…‘personalized’ search as it were. Not very useful for ascertaining campaign effectiveness.

If you’re hoping to be found purely by a search on the store, you’ve already lost. The people above you game that system so hard it bleeds. If you really want your game to succeed, you can try 2 approaches:

  1. Cross your fingers and pray

  2. Advertise your game

Sometimes games go viral and you end up with flappy bird or candy crush. 99.99% of the time though, they either advertise or die. Even AAA publishers can (and do) spend up to 50% of their budget on marketing.

They often spend much more than 50% of their budget on advertising and fail much more often than 50% of the time. There is good reason that Unity wants to add advertising to their business model.

I need to correct my attitude here as I said, ‘what Google’s up against’ as if I believe the moaning Google claims to suffer is sincere because of SEOs gaming the system. SEOs gaming the system is Google’s dream come true because SEOs giving the false hope that you can cheaply and effectively advertise via Google using the money the SEOs spend to drive up ad rates and buy obscure and silly advertising keywords is what Google is as a business.

Doing a local media tour is a cheaper way and more effective of advertising if you’ve created a game, an album, an app, a movie that you really believe in enough that you think a journalist stranger would want to invite you to their office and write about your creation.

Well, some downloads and good reviews have tricked in and it appears higher, like fifteen or so. I guess that’s not so bad… Hopefully upcoming update with leaderboards and play services will boost interest. If I Google asteroid buster now though, I’ve got up to first result. I’ll probably have people Google it haha.

Edit oh and I don’t really care to improve the game itself much beyond what it is because I’m really just rebooting my old game, not any graphics or gameplay changes, just a whole new apk and update/fixes/play services… It’s nothing super original or innovative, but fun! Lol at least for me but I’m biased :slight_smile: