
Apple Acquires Chomp; App Store Search And Discovery To Be Completely Revamped - rkudeshi
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/apple-chomp/
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zavulon
I really hope this means there will be a better way to find games. When I
search for "rpg", what I really want is an old school RPG game, you know,
where you kill monsters, solve quests and get XP points. Instead, I get a
massive amount of MMORPG's (which are not really RPG's at all), and "Do you
want to be Chris Brown" applications.

On the same token, when I search for "adventure" games, I really want to find
games like Sam & Max or Monkey Island. Instead, I see a whole bunch of kids
games, and at best, "find a hidden object" games. Not what I want at ALL.

<http://rpg-site.com/> and <http://toucharcade.com/category/games/adventure/>
help, but they still miss a lot of stuff.

Edit: tried out Chomp, it doesn't help. This problem would be ridiculously
easy to solve with letting users tag apps

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jonhendry
"This problem would be ridiculously easy to solve with letting users tag apps"

Are you sure? That would be abused for SEO in about two nanoseconds.

IMHO, the app store has too few categories to put apps in. A richer taxonomy
would be better.

~~~
smackfu
Also only works if the tags match up to your expectations. It's easy to
imagine a perfect world where every old school RPG is tagged with old-school-
rpg but that doesn't really seem likely.

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phil
On behalf of all app developers: oh, hell yes.

~~~
kenrikm
Exactly, this is so needed. As it is now unless it's in the top 100 it does
not exist.

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kolinko
well - it depends on the category. For games/entertainment this is true, but
for productivity etc, a good SEO can make a big difference (
<http://www.slideshare.net/kolinko/app-store-seo-tutorial> )

~~~
phil
That's true, but their search ranking is weird and kind of broken right now
(e.g. company name is indexed; descriptions aren't). It would be great if that
got overhauled.

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barredo
How many times did you bought a new app you discovered through Genius? That's
why.

~~~
ugh
I can see how it’s better (the performance is awesome, searching in iTunes is
just sooo damn slow, inflexible and no fun) and it has some cool but obvious
tools. I’m just wondering why Apple needs to buy them. Can they really not
just copy that?

~~~
pooriaazimi
I came here to say how nice of Apple not just bluntly copying Chomp (you know,
like widgets, Safari Reader and notifications)...

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ugh
I don’t think it’s possible to bluntly copy Chomp (if you stay away from
copying their aesthetics). All the stuff they do is pretty obvious and
standard. It’s only special because the App Store search is so terrible.

To me a performance upgrade would be the most valuable thing, I don’t think
anyone would claim Apple copied Chomp when their search suddenly performs
better.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
But why reinvent the wheel? They saw something they liked, they thought it was
better to buy the technology, so they did. Good for Apple and good for Chomp!

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tluyben2
I hope 'search gigant' Google will fix their discovery system; I find the
Android store results, at least for what I search for, biased towards big
publishers on the one side and total crap on the other. Usually I use
google.com to discover apps and after that I find them in the Market, not the
other way around as it should be (find app => search for reviews online). It
seems weird that I have to do it like that. In the Appstore I never had that
problem.

Same with promotion of my games/apps => Appstore gives you a lot more 'credit'
(for lack of a better word) as indie/starter than Market seems to do. Ofcourse
the one (inability to discover what you want/need) creates the other (low
downloads/sales).

Not sure if that's a glitch on my part somehow, but in the indie communities I
'hang', almost everyone has the same issues.

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ghc
Oh great. So now what am I going to use to search for new apps in Android?

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thijser
This is an interesting development, where better search/discovery technology
gets acquired and (hopefully) integrated into the main platform. Apple was
able to acquire a company with proven technology, because Apple provides
plenty of hooks for third party services to allow them to innovate much faster
on search/discovery technologies than iTunes itself can.

Unfortunately for Android Apple is way ahead of Google here, with the iTunes
store having an affiliate model for all paid apps, and ways to get the actual
appstore listings programmatically. AppBrain and other services that want to
provide Android app discovery services have to go through a painful process of
getting information about Android apps, and even then it's nearly impossible
to know whether a particular app will be available to a certain phone model X
running in country Y. In addition, there is no direct way to monetize the
leads that can be generated through good discovery algorithms. It's ironic how
the more iTunes store in this sense is more open than the Android market.

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georgelawrence
I was going to launch something similar <http://www.appstoretools.com> as a
fun little side project this weekend... But if Chomp is worth $50M, maybe
"side project" is not the right way to think of it?

~~~
paraschopra
Their team size was 20. Clearly it wasn't a side project.

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foobarbazetc
I just tried Chomp.

The sorting makes no sense, looks to be hand-edited or possibly paid for by
the apps, and the current App Store sort seems to be better to me.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong part of Chomp? Which section do people like?

~~~
dangero
I agree the sorting right now is crap. I think the idea is that right now
chomp cannot grab internal data to sort things, so the idea is to combine the
data available on Apple's internal side with some of chomp's concepts and
technology. The other thing is that it removes chomp search for Android which
makes the gap between Android and iOS app market even larger.

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Maro
What the App store needs is recommendations like Amazon. I'd spend way more
money, like I do at Amazon =)

~~~
coob
It has 'Genius' for App discovery, which recommends apps based on previous
purchases. It's well hidden and not very good.

~~~
Aqua_Geek
I'm curious as to how helpful "Genius" is for you. If I've already bought a
to-do app, for example, the odds of me wanting to buy another one are pretty
small. And yet, that seems to be the kind of thing that "Genius" always
recommends - more of the same kind of app I've already bought.

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dirkdk
awesome, finally Apple is going to improve app discovery, because that sucked
pretty much. Here's a blogpost I wrote about what Apple should do with the App
Store: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3628073>

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boonez123
50 MILLION! Sheesh.

[http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/chomp-
chomp...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/chomp-chomp-apple-
eats-aussie-startup-for-us50m-20120224-1tsbi.html)

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jljacques
I'm really excited to see what Apple comes out with on this. Any thoughts on
how long this might take Apple to actually implement any changes to the
system?

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cycle
I think something like Amazon's or Netflix's similar products would be great.

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indraneel24
Kevin Rose was an investor in Chomp, IIRC. Good for him.

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ilamont
Is this basically better search technology?

