App Search Engine Idea – Spread the Word
Why isn’t there an app search engine? Think about it, a search engine on your mobile phone that will allow you access to all apps available on Google Play and App Store without the need to download them to your phone? It’s a great idea, isn’t it, so how come there are no developers who are picking up the glove?
If you are interested in this idea, or know someone who can really make it happen, please send them this article and get the ball rolling.
How will an App Search Engine work?
Well, same thing as a regular search engine does today. Regular search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo create an indexed version of all the web pages they can find on their own servers. Then when we type in a search query an algorithm goes through all the pages indexed and shows us the results it believes are the most relevant.
So an app search engine would have to do the same thing. Download all the apps available on the internet into its own servers, create cached versions of the pages of the app it finds and show them to us (according to relevancy) based on the search term we enter.
But aren’t apps different than regular websites?
You’d be surprised to know that over 90% of all apps found on Google Play and App Store are written in HTML5. HTML5 is the most updated and common HTML language used to create most modern websites today. So apps are basically the same as regular websites.
So yes, hypothetically an app search engine could work in the same manner that a regular search engine works.
Limitations and Advantages
Advantages:
An app search engine would have one immediate positive advantage. It would save your iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone a lot of storage space. This means that instead of downloading each and every app to your phone, which takes up a lot of memory storage on your mobile device, you would be able to access that app through a browser and save up on the download completely and on a ton of memory. It would also not limit the number of apps you could use on your phone due to the memory they take up. People with mobile phones would no longer be limited to a certain number of apps they could use on their phones because their devices have a certain predetermined memory storage capacity.
Another big advantage would be that all apps are mobile friendly by default (since they are designed for mobile phones), and now people would shift from using the regular website to the apps themselves and have a much better user experience in doing so. This would save up on all the old websites that aren’t mobile friendly which still make using them with pinching the screen a hassle. the move to tap browsing would be complete and make apps the new websites of today.
Limitations:
A search engine for apps would have the same limitations as our contemporary search engines do. It would not be able to access registered and password protected pages to create an indexed version of them, but it would allow a user to login and use the app in the same way as a user would after opening an app he/she downloaded to their phone. So basically, no real limitation there.
Compatibility however could be an issue. Today developers are torn between two major cellular phone companies Apple and Google. The iOS and Android operating systems require different programming of the app in order to make it compatible to the mobile phones they are downloaded to. Be it, Nexus, iPhone, iPad or any other device, certain tweaking must be made by the creators of the app in order to make it work properly on all phones.
Today, some app publishers don’t offer an Android version of the app or an iOS version of the app. Maybe it’s due to extra investment and work required, maybe it’s based on the majority of their clients coming from a specific type of mobile phone. Whatever the reason, not all apps work on all devices.
In order to make their apps compatible with all phones the developers of the apps must put in extra work.
However, if all the developers do is create an app which redirects to an HTML5 version website then a lot of compatibility issues could be solved since HTML5 sites are responsive by default and are by default compatible with all mobile devices.
An App Search Engine is Coming
Make no mistake, somewhere in the world a developer is currently working on an app search engine. My gamble would be that Google or Apple have already picked up the glove, but a final prototype has yet to be made.
The costs of creating a huge server farm which can crawl and index all the apps in the world by downloading them are tremendous. Add to these the costs of bandwidth and CPU usage to reach and analyze the data and a it’s plain to see that this job is not for any high tech simpleton.
We at Top100DatingApps.com know that we would love to see a dating apps search engine be a reallity, but for now we will stick to our reviews and trying to give you the best insights into the world of apps and dating.
A famous actor once said: “a man should know his limitations”. I know that I do not have the skills to create a search engine for apps, but if you are reading this and know someone who does, please send him or her this post to help the ball start rolling.