Did the headline catch your eye? I really wanted a teaser headline for this post which would entice people to read and discover the details of a new global search engine — but for that message, a teaser alone just wasn’t credible.
But when I added the word “Apple” to the headline, it completely changed its dynamics — just like Apple does every time it enters a new business area.
So, I must be talking about Siri right? Wrong. I agree actually that Siri is a really important development, but Apple has much more up its sleeve than just Siri.
What Does Apple Have Up Its Sleeve?
On the 23rd of February, Techcrunch followed by the Financial Times reported that Apple had paid $50 million to acquire a start-up called “Chomp”, whose homepage is shown below.
Chomp is an app search engine where you can find apps using keyword search. Intriguingly, it covers both iPhone and iPad along with Android.
Chomp Is The New Global Search Engine Due To Launch SoonThe image below shows how Chomp currently presents listings (that’s rankings right?) for apps giving you their ratings and clearly identifying if they are free are not.
The team which created Chomp is already working at Apple on the company’s plan to replace the current “App Stores” with Chomp or a version of it.
Chomp Shows Apps Trending In Popularity And Algorithmically Selects CategoriesA little testing of Chomp reveals that it is a little more sensitive to keywords than the App Stores themselves – but much needs to be done. Don’t forget, there are now well over half a billion apps which have been downloaded over 25 billion times.
For “apps” read “websites” and for listings read “rankings”, this is big world search and its happening all over again. The app world is now bigger than Google was in the year 2000 when Google had indexed one billion pages — since an app typically has several “pages”.
“Expect To Be Penalized For Abusing Our Rankings!”
Apple is already releasing warnings to app developers saying, “You should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”
That is such an uncanny parallel of warnings which Google gave to users of analysis and positioning software in the early years including that they would have their websites de-indexed.
Search For Apps By KeywordAlthough Chomp’s multilingual capability is currently still sadly lacking (as was Google’s before 2006), the image below suggests that the potential for rolling this out successfully globally is just vast. Don’t forget, Apple already has the apps “indexed”, it just needs to provide greater access to them via a more effective search paradigm.
GitHub: Software description: a software to manage books in the computer (C#). →