Yahoo today launched a new search service that aims to improve the searching experience for the iPhone App Store and the Android Marketplace. The service brings a new app called Yahoo! AppSpot to the iPhone and Android as well as the Yahoo! App Search website.
With 425,000-plus apps in the Apple App Store and 200,000 apps in Android Market, we know finding what you want can be exhausting. And even more challenging: There are times you don’t know the specific name of the app, so you’re leaving it up to chance that you’re actually downloading the app you really want.
Yahoo claims to be able to search the App Store and Android Marketplace more intelligently as well as also offering users personal recommendations from within the AppSpot app. The personal recommendations feature works by first taking a look at all the apps you currently have on your iPhone (it asks for permission) and then displays eight suggestions for each category of the store. Unfortunately the recommendation system seemed very poor for me at least, suggesting a rather bizarre range of apps from ‘Alphabet Car’ to ‘Justin Bieber Revenge’ to ‘Foreclosure Search’.
Both the website and the app from Yahoo gives you all the same information that Apple’s own store provides, including: a description, rating, price and screenshots. If you choose to download the app through the AppSpot app it will launch you straight over to the App Store app. If you’re on the website on your Mac/PC though it will give you the option to either send an SMS with a link, open up the iTunes Preview page in your browser or display a QR code with the link embedded (the AppSpot App has a QR reader inbuilt).
You can try Yahoo! App Search from here and download the Yahoo! AppSpot App from here. Jump the break for a video promo.
[Via Engadget]
