Re: Search engine for apps

On Mar 7, 2013 2:58 AM, "Dominique Hazael-Massieux" <dom@w3.org> wrote:
>
> Apps stores let their users find apps via search. Search has
> traditionally been a very strong point of the Web, but I think Web apps
> likely create specific issues in this space:
> * they're not necessarily easy to crawl (since many views are likely to
> depend on real user interactions)
>
> * they're not necessarily heavy on indexable content (e.g. the content
> might entirely depend on a specific user input)
>
> * there is no systematic way (that I know of) to describe what a Web app
> does and get is exposed as such in a search engine
>
> * it is probably hard for a search engine to determine if a given Web
> app will work (well or at all) on a given device
>
> * ranking apps might require more data than what search engines have
> traditionally been able to gather (e.g. interlinking)
>
> I think many of these items could be helped by new specification work;
> some of them might already be addressed by existing products on the
> market (e.g. the search view that FirefoxOS is providing, powered from
> what I understand by Everything.me).
>
> I'm really interested to hear what people feel about the importance of
> this gap, and to hear again about ideas on how to address it (either
> through contacts, or via early spec work, or through a workshop, etc).

Search is definitely a very important issue. I don't know a lot about the
details of everything.me, but I think they are relying on a lot of manual
work to find and write up metadata about the different apps. So not as
scalable as we traditionally think of search.

There is also solutions like the ones that Quixey is working on. As I
understand it it heavily relies on stores and app developers annotating
their app related content with metadata.

In general this is an area that I know very little about and where I have
no idea what will work and what won't.

/ Jonas