No, it’s no Google, and not even a Yahoo, but Ask.com still gets three percent of U.S.-based query volume, and had almost 150 million unique visitors in October 2012, according to Compete.com.

Which makes it about 100-150 Quoras.

Quixey indexes Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry apps not just by their title and description, but by everything that is said about them online. That makes Quixey’s results much more relevant, according to Quixey CEO Tomer Kagan.

“With apps we’ve taken a step forward in terms of functionality,” Kagan told me yesterday, “but a step back in terms of discoverability.”

Starting at 5PM today on Ask.com, app-related searches will automatically include apps in the primary search results. Alternatively, users who wish to restrict the search results to apps only, can simply click the Apps tab:

This is Quixey’s biggest integration to date, having previously integrated with companies such as Skyfire and Appthority.

The company is a B to B to C play, meaning that it does not provide services directly to consumers, but simply works through other consumer-facing companies. In fact, while Quixey has a website that demonstrates app search, there is not a single employee in the company whose responsibility it is to maintain that page, Kagan said.

The integration means that searching for apps will be a whole lot easier — and better, Kagan says.

“Often an app is a better result than a web page,” Kagan told me. “For example, if I want to find the best hikes in my area.”

From Ask.com’s perspective, adding app search rounds out its results, and opens new doors. For example, queries such as “watch Toy Story” will now include links to Netflix and Hulu, where users can actually watch the entire movie.

“Apps are gateways to some of the most top-notch digital content out there, so this integration fits perfectly with where our product is headed, especially when it comes to mobile devices,” Ask COO  Shane McGilloway said in a statement.

photo credit: schnaars via photopin cc

Berlin, Germany-based Xyologic has announced the closed beta test of its tech, which the company has especially geared toward helping users find great games. The aim is to give users a new type of experience as they explore apps stores for the best stuff available.

The team, headed by Matthaus Krzykowski (full disclosure: he is a former VentureBeat mobile consultant), has been creating the app search engine since 2010. Krzykowski said, “Mainstream smartphone users understand that apps let them do great things on their phones and tablets; however, most don’t know what their options are.”

The Google Play store for Android has more than 493,000 apps in it. Finding exactly what you want among them can be a nightmare. Discovering the right content is the challenge of the modern app era. The logical answer is a search engine, which solved the problem of finding what we need among millions of web sites.

“We don’t claim to ‘solve’ any of the big issues of our industry,” said Xyologic co-founder Zoe Adamovicz. “But we believe we have some new, better answers. We are releasing our service in closed beta to show some of the work we have done so far, get feedback, and continue our work.”

Since the summer of 2010, Xyologic has been gathering information on how users search for apps, what queries they type, and how they behave. The company created an alpha version of its app search engine that was integrated with its partners. That generated millions of queries.

The conclusion was that demand is high for a powerful app search engine that must understand vaguely expressed intentions and general queries. Mainstream users want to be shown the best games and app alternatives within categories. Xyologic complied by offering an extensive set of choices, identifying 700 categories and more than 100 game genres, said Xyologic co-founder Marcin Rudolf.

“This allows us to show these mobile app and game genres as possible choices to our users,” Rudolf said.

Xyologic also looked at studies by Chomp, an app search company that Apple acquired, and it identified different types of users. Xyologic says that around 75 percent to 80 percent of users type in general categories — like social networking, education, or action games — into the search box. Games are the leading downloads on iOS and have also become increasingly important on Android. Around 10 percent to 15 percent of users look for inspiration, typing in search terms such as “games” and “new,” “free,” or “fun.” Just 5 percent of all users seek specific brands or titles. Another 5 percent look for functions such as “crop photos,” “block calls,” or “view movies.”

Given this vagueness in most searches, Xyologic built a search engine that gives users options at every step of the way, offering different suggestions that might satisfy the user’s curiosity.

Xyologic also puts the best apps up highest in its search rankings, giving the user an idea of the quality of an app at a glance based on community sentiments and other features.

Xyologic has also raised an undisclosed amount of funds from some prominent investors, including Rick Thompson’s (co-founder of Playdom) Signia Venture Partners, Klaas Kersting (founder of Gameforge), and Eric Wahlforss (co-founder of SoundCloud). Xyologic plans to use the money to speed the rollout of its search engine on other mobile platforms, including iOS.

Thompson said, “Xyologic’s app search is the first search designed from the ground up for mobile games.”

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With its latest iPhone app, the mobile app search company Chomp has delivered a stylish new redesign that not only looks good, but will also help you easily find new and interesting apps.

The free Chomp app, available today on the iTunes Store, is a prime example of how an attractive interface can help users better take advantage of existing functionality. It’s also the first in Chomp’s lineup (which includes its Android and web apps) to receive the new look.

“We tried to build a cleaner and faster design for users, so they can get the maximum power out of our search and discovery engine,” Chomp CEO Ben Keighran told VentureBeat in an interview.

The design came about after Chomp spent the last year conducting focus tests and gathering input from users. “Based on their input and what we’ve learned during our time on the market we decided to take another leap forward,” Keighran said in a statement today. “We didn’t limit ourselves to existing best practices or what we’d invested in our previous interface design.”

Indeed, the new Chomp iPhone app looks nothing like its predecessors. As soon as you launch the app, you’re presented with a new search box that offers suggestions, as well as attractive (and useful) tiles on the home screen, including daily free apps, top 100 apps, new apps, and those on sale. Apps are selected for those particular sections using Chomp’s algorithm, which ranks apps based on their downloads, iTunes rankings, search frequency, as well as blog and Twitter chatter about the apps.

The app’s home screen also features the top 10 app search terms currently trending on Chomp, as well as a button that randomly suggests an app to try out.

After testing Chomp’s new iPhone app for some time, I’ve found it to be much more dynamic and welcoming than its previous versions. The app’s home screen rarely looks the same when you launch it, and the experience of finding apps simply feels more fun than Apple and Google’s app stores, as well as competitors like GetJar and Quixey.

Together with its new iPhone app today, Chomp is also announcing its new search ads product, which will allow developers to bid on keywords and search terms used within its mobile app search. Chomp Search Ads is launching in private beta today, with mobile development startup Milk and local marketplace Zaarly among its first customers.

Chomp is based in San Francisco and has raised about $2.5 million in funding from Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, David Lee, Auren Hoffman, Brian Pokorny, and BlueRun Ventures.

Quixey aims to do something new: It lets users search for mobile, desktop and web apps based on what the app does. The company calls this “functional search,” and Quixey says it differs from typical mobile app store search, which is based on keywords found in titles and descriptions.

Instead of relying solely on what app developers say about their own products, Quixey incorporates data from review sites, blogs and social networks to determine what an app does. Using this fuller set of information on app functions and features, Quixey is able to show users an ostensibly more accurate and complete list of apps.

“Apps make people’s lives better… Quixey is working with companies throughout the world to ensure that their users can finally access what technology has to offer,” said Tomer Kagan, Quixey co-founder and CEO in a release today.

Right now, the app search works for platforms such as Android, iOS, Mac and Windows. Quixey also covers apps, plugins and extensions for browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, apps for Facebook, general web apps and more.

The new funding will help get Quixey’s services onto more devices by allowing for more and better partnerships with manufacturers, carrier networks, app stores such as the iTunes App Store and Android Market and other organizations that control what functions appear on smartphones and other devices. Quixey hopes to power app search for these entities, and it currently also lets individuals run queries on its website.

The $3.8 million is Quixey’s first institutional round. The investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group with participation from Webb Investment Network and Innovation Endeavors.

Image courtesy of Flickr, liewcf.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Quixey, a new startup that’s developing a search engine dedicated to apps, announced today that it will also make life easier for developers by giving them an easy way to manage their apps across multiple stores.

Such a feature would be a boon to developers, since they can manage messaging for theirs apps in one location instead of having to visit each app store one at a time. Additionally, Quixey’s App Developer accounts will allow developers to see what users are saying about their apps in one location. The company says it has received “extremely positive feedback” from developers who’ve been testing out the accounts.

Quixey’s search technology will also scrape the web to find all available versions of apps, which will remind developers of the platforms they haven’t yet hit, and will offer consumers an easy way to see which platforms their favorite apps support.

Quixey has built from scratch an app search engine that responds to user needs. For example, a query of “find cheap gas” will bring up apps that will help with just that. Founders Tomer Kagan and Liron Shapira call this “functional search” and describe it as “a new type of search specifically for the app world.”

The company will compete directly with Chomp, which has been attacking the app discovery problem for some time now — first with app recommendations, and now with a search engine focus. Appolicious has also been in the app search game for some time now.

Mountain View, Calif.,-based Quixey has raised $400,000 in seed funding from investors including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavours and Archimedes Ventures. The company plans to launch at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City on May 23 to May 25.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Finally, it looks like searching for apps on your smartphone will go from a terrible experience to a pretty good one.

Chomp, a website that recommends mobile applications, has just launched an app for the iPhone that offers a nifty sort of search engine — one that matches modern mobile browsing habits.

Google’s model of search breaks down in mobile, because Google relies on links to evaluate a Web page’s relevance and credibility. Chomp recognizes that mobile apps built for phones don’t get inbound links, and so throws out that page-ranking approach. Instead, Chomp lets you search for apps with more refined topic categories, and also gives you tips about who else among your friends have rated the apps favorably.

If you’re a typical smartphone user, you’ve probably been stymied when searching for application you want. I have. The experience is awful, because the App Store search engine really only lets you search by keyword. And with more than 250,000 applications to search from, it does a pretty bad job. Either that, or you search the Store by broad category, say “music.” If the app isn’t in the top 25, you’re unlikely to find it.

Or search for “car racing game.” See how Apple struggles with the results. It spits out app names with the word “car” in them. It has no idea you’re looking for a game.

That’s where Chomp comes in. Founder and chief executive Ben Keighran let me play around with the new Chomp app. Query Chomp’s search app for “car racing game,” and you’ll get games about car racing, and you’ll also get references to specific games that have been rated positively by your friends on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

More generally, if you type in “car,” it won’t spit out a random list of apps that have the word “car” in their names. Instead, it will ask you what sort of car app you’re looking for, prompting you with choices such as “navigation,” “mileage”  and other options. Swipe the menu bar to the left, and eventually you’ll actually get an option for “car racing game.”

Chomp launched its initial “recommendation engine” late last year, and has been generating reviews from users. Chomp has 400,000 active monthly users and 50 million recommendations, according to Keighran. It managed this, he says, by working hard to make reviews extremely easy to share: As soon as a user reviews an app, they can post it to Twitter or Facebook with a single button. This puts the review in the activity stream of your friends’ accounts, and so they see the recommendations even if they haven’t downloaded Chomp. (See the video below.) But until now, Chomp hadn’t released a separate search engine.

There’s no doubt Chomp improves on existing search. But the question is whether search is a big enough problem for users that massive numbers will feel compelled to download the app. Soon, Chomp will release an app for Android and other platforms, Keighran says.

One thing is for sure: Keirgan seems pretty determined to make Chomp relevant. This is his second startup and he says he’s spent a lot more time thinking through where the mobile Web is really headed. His previous company, Bluepulse, was an early player in mobile social networking, but it took too much venture capital and he couldn’t find a business model to match it. This time, he’s also found a credible cofounder for his mission in Cathy Edwards, who has an background in artificial intelligence, which is crucial for the semantic search elements Chomp is pushing.

The app searches for both native applications and HTML5 versions of mobile web sites.

The approach embraces what Keighran says is a sea change in the way people are surfing websites. Particularly on mobile phones, users have less patience for slower moving websites; they hesitate to click on links they fear will take several seconds to render. They prefer native phone apps, and they’re swiping with their fingers more, clicking on buttons and using tab bars to move from page to page. Moreover, these native apps tend to be centralized. Links tend to more often lead to other pages within the app itself, instead of linking off to a browser page.

His belief is that people will consume apps just like they consume music. You might have your favorite bands, and so you’ll listen to the music of these bands regularly, but you’ll also typically hunt for new music on a regular basis. The same thing goes for discovering new apps. You’ll have your core applications that you use daily, but you’ll also want to discover new ones, and there’s currently no good way to do that. By mixing semantic search and personal recommendation from friends, Keighran says he thinks he’s found the answer.

Chomp has raised about $2.5 million in Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, David Lee, Auren Hoffman, Brian Pokorny, and BlueRun Ventures.