The problem with the Market is the organization. It isn’t intuitively designed. It has only basic filters, like Features, Latest, Top Paid, and Top Free. It only has one level of categorization. We call upon Google to subdivide the market further into more categories and add more advanced search options, perhaps separate the gaming, the wallpaper/soundboards, productivity apps, and adult entertainment into independent sections and allow categories to be automatically filtered from search if you are uninterested in them.
The Market is open and unrestricted, allowing a lot of duplicative and useless garbage to be entered into it. Without Google providing a superior hierarchy, we will have to defer to third party applications(which we might do anyway), such as AppBrain or Doubletwist. More on them in future posts.
How do you think the Android Market could be fixed? Comment below.
I think the Android Market needs categories at least, to keep up with Apple. To gain a competitive edge, Google could consider organizing via “tag,” like Flickr (and most blogs).
For example, a game about finance might be tagged “entertainment” and “finance” and “game” and so on. This would allow easy searching to fit in with Google’s main business: search.
This would also allow filters pretty easily: the Market could have a “exclude all items tagged with:” field, so I could search for all non-puzzle games, for example. This is not currently possible in Apple’s App Store, nor Palm’s App Catalog.
We agree. Google is the King of Information search. They certainly should do a better job.