The New and Improved Marketplace Search
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Searching for apps on Windows Phone has significantly improved today. Now that Microsoft addressed the issue of giving an app’s title too much importance, Marketplace search is more robust and more powerful than before.
The new search system relies on the Bing search engine, and can finally handle common search mistakes like typos. If you type “twittre” by accident, you’ll still get results for “twitter”.
The search engine also scans app’s descriptions when searching for apps, instead of just keywords and titles. This can be proven by searching for “homework planner” as seen in the image to the right. My app, Grade Calculator, is not tagged with “homework” or “planner”, but in the description I say to download my “homework planner” app, which causes the grade calculator to appear in homework planner searches! This of course could be good or bad (In this case bad.. my grade calculator shouldn’t be showing up in this search, but for other scenarios it could be great).
Microsoft also says that the Bing algorithm will learn from searches over time and eventually get smarter! So Marketplace search should only be improving from here on out.
Read more about the changes on the Windows Phone Blog.
