Search Improvements to BlackBerry World Designed to Help in Finding its Apps, Games

After being out for a few months, the BlackBerry World app store is seeing an overhaul. Improvements have been implemented to make the discovery of its content more helpful to users.

Search options have been improved with the support of keywords within the search, helping to highlight more apps.

Another improvement is the addition of a detailed ranking system. These will include the number of downloads for each app and a user rating – all of which become part of the search results. The idea is to get the “cream of the crop” to rise to the top, so that when a user searches, they see the most popular and favorite apps.

This will be of great benefit to app developers as well. If you do a search of, say, “action games,” the result will show you a list of apps that fall into the action games category. In addition, apps that have the words in their title will also be high on result rankings.

And if that’s not enough, you’ll also see results that match company names, and all of that company’s apps will be displayed.

BlackBerry has improved and fixed the issues involving product pages too. It has re-enabled the option to sort apps by popularity and reintroduced Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. RSS, sometimes referred to as Really Simple Syndication, is a family of Web feed formats. They are used to publish frequently updated works, such as blog entries, news headlines, audio and video. This is accomplished in a standardized format.

An RSS document, called a "feed," "Web feed" or "channel,” includes full or summarized text, as well as publishing dates and authorship.

BlackBerry is still working on filling the BlackBerry World app store. The goal has been to have 100,000 native apps available. Currently, there are over 80,000 apps ready for the new BB10 platform – up from about 70,000 a couple of months ago. This number is still lagging behind both Google and Apple.

Google Play has about 700,000 apps, while Apple’s App Store reached the 775,000 mark in January.

These improvements will be making their way to BlackBerry World stores this week. The main changes that you can expect to see are:

Keywords – your content title, category name(s) and vendor name will automatically be added as keywords. For example, searches for ‘action games’ will return games in Games > Action category. Searches for “title” or ”vendor” will find ”title” from ”vendor” – so searching for “Color ID Motek” will return Color ID.

Boost – With the changes, rankings will now include downloads and ratings information to help boost the ranking of the results. Note that downloads and ratings don’t determine whether your app appears in search results. That’s determined by title, keywords and short description – the search criteria. Downloads and ratings determine the search rank along with the search criteria. For example, all other criteria being equal, the app with the larger number of downloads will have the better ranking.