AppsVu now offers a third option for the Android Market mirror. AppStoreHQ now joins Cyrket and AndroLib links for each search result. This is what the results look like now:

Clicking on the [AppStoreHQ] link will take you to the app detail page. AppStoreHQ offers a clean, clutter-free interface and this new addition will definitely help searchers quickly search for, decide on, and install the right Android apps. 

It may take some time to propagate through the cache, but it’s up and working right now. 

AppsVu crossed 100,000 queries a few days back and it’s time to look at some interesting numbers around the querying and filtering habits of Android users. 

Below you can see the 5 most popular queries (normalized so that the most popular query, “games”, is 100):

You can see that the falloff of the power-law head is quite steep. This jives with the really long tail, with several hundred unusual queries that have been searched only a single time. 

Also interesting is that the number of queries for [facebook] is about double that of queries for [twitter]. 

AppsVu offers the ability to filter any query so that only free or paid apps or shown. 

Of all the queries that were filtered either by Free or Paid (there are other filtering options), Paid filtering only accounted for about 9% of the number of times the Free filter was used:

This really underscores the need for Android developers to offer a Lite version of paid apps. The discoverability is much, much higher for free apps. 

7% of visitors used the free filter, vs. less than 1% enabling the paid filter. 

AppsVu now offers the ability to filter apps based on rating as well as Free vs. Paid at the same time. So you can now find paid apps with a rating of 3 Stars or better for any given query. The filters are added just below the regular filters you’ve already been using:

The filtering is done at the same speed as the other filters, so you won’t see any performance degradation while using these new filters. 

AppsVu is all about helping you search for, decide on, and install the best app for your needs as quickly as possible. With this in mind, the first few results (typically three) have a [screenshot] meta link that will open a screenshot hosted at Cyrket.com in a separate window. This step, along with many others, is designed to help you quickly make a decision without leaving the site. 

Also new is a review section that searches across all the major Android app reviews sites and presents up to four results. These review results are slotted in after the first few relevant Market results. This is in addition to the previously mentioned review links shown below the pagination links. These are all designed to help the searcher discover the right app as quickly as possible. Scouring both the Android Market as well as hand-picked app reviews helps tremendously with this. 

AppsVu now shows a sample of search results from review sites like androidtapp.com for every search along with the standard Android Market results. For now, these appear only at the bottom of the first page of results, below the pagination links. Like so:

The example results above show up when you search for the keyword “finance” on AppsVu. Not all searches show these results (because the vast majority of Android apps haven’t yet been reviewed). However most common keywords, and especially keywords that match common categories, will show results. 

More work to be done, but a good start on including the burgeoning Android apps review community in AppsVu search results. 

The [market] link is now the last and right-most link on search results. Before this, the [QR Code] link was positioned as the right-most link. Several Android users searching on AppsVu from their smartphones would hit the [QR Code] link, which only makes sense if these were accidental clicks. Now it’s much easier for mobile users to simply hit the last link on the right without the fear of missing and hitting a useless link. 

A case can be made for not showing [market] links to non-Android users at all. However, most visitors first visit through their PCs, notice the [market] link, and then start using AppsVu from their Android devices. So there’s no easy to way to expose the functionality and retain the discoverability while taking the [market] links out for non-Android users. 

Now even novel queries should be much quicker in presenting results, not just the popular ones. In addition, sorting and filtering have been speeded up substantially for all queries as well. 

Popular searches now load significantly faster. Several different optimizations have been completed and they should all work together to deliver a faster experience for most visitors.

Please continue to offer Feedback.

You can now find many more sources of Android Apps reviews in your search results. Starting with Android Tapp mentioned previously, there are now 4 other review sites integrated. So almost a thousand Android Apps have 3rd party “[review]” links showing up on search results.

Integrating more authoritative review sites and improving the existing experience continues to be a priority here at AppsVu HQ!

Previously, the [QR Code] link to the right of every search result on AppsVu popped up a new window with the image. Now, the QR Code shows up as a nice javascript lightbox overlaid on the search results page itself. Like this:

We’re out of the dark ages now.