Cool Play Store Search Techniques

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Cool Play Store Search Techniques

Cool Play Store Search Techniques

Searching for apps in the Play Store is somewhat like trying to find a needle in a haystack. As more and more apps get submitted and approved, finding the thing you are looking for may need a ninja trick or two. Today, I’m going to show you a couple of search techniques that might help you in filtering out all the noise when searching for apps.

The Title Search

Sometimes, a lot of apps may have the same keyword or title that you are looking for. For the sake of the tutorial, let’s try making a search for Zombie Land, a theme after the movie of same title.

Let’s go to the Play Store and search using the string Zombie Land on the search bar. You will get a result list similar to this:

Search 1

Notice that the app we are looking for doesn’t even appear in the first few items that were retrieved. It may be in there somewhere, but you might have to go and scroll along and maybe even go through some pages to find it.

Watch what happens when we search using this string: Zombie intitle:land

 Search 2Now you have the app we want right there as the 2nd item on the list. What exactly did we do? Well, we searched for apps that have the loose term zombie but filter it with apps that have the word “Land” in the title. Unless the app had the word “Land” in the title, the app will not appear.

This also works when you are using a term that is not quite common. There are plenty of apps out there with the word “foo”, but every time you search, you end up getting corrected. The search terms now list items that have the word “food” instead.

 Search 3

Now, watch what happens when we put in the intitle: tag when searching for foo:

 Search 4

Now you see a list of apps that specifically use foo in the title of the app. There may be plenty of other uses for searching for a specific title, and only time will tell if you will be able to take full advantage of this feature.

You can also use the filter allintitle: to search for more words in a title. For example, you want a phase to appear in the title, like ‘root required’. This helps you find apps that actually require root to take better advantage of your rooted status.

Search 4.5

Notice that all apps that are labeled with ‘root required’ in the title, regardless of all the other content is now listed out for you. Such is the beauty of proper filters.

The Exclude Filter

Another great search tool is the exclude filter. This filter allows you to exclude a certain term word from your search results. Let’s say you are searching for a Launcher application. You want to make sure you find a list of great launchers to choose from, but you also want to make sure you don’t end up with a long list of launcher themes.

Search 5

When you just use the term “launcher” when searching, you will notice that a lot of themes also pop up in the list. The greatest perpetrator of this atrocity is Go Launcher, which is known for having a whole lot of 3rd party themes. That is of course a good thing if you are looking for Go Launcher themes, but what we want are just launchers. So, we exclude the word theme by appending a minus sign before it.

Search 6

As you can see, we now have a full list of launchers and no themes to get in our way. Try this out yourself when you want to filter out annoying terms that may be popping up in your search.

Publisher or Developer Search

Sometimes, you just want to search for apps by a certain developer you trust. Some may find it difficult to find all the apps developed by a certain group when searching. It actually requires you to know each app’s name. Well, as it turns out some people don’t realize that if you click on the developer name, you can find all the apps that developer has made.

Let’s try searching for Asphalt 7

Search 7

Do you see the Developer name ‘Gameloft’ right under the official Asphalt 7 game? When you click on that link, you will be taken to a list of games created by developer ‘Gameloft’.

 

Search 8

There you go. This works for all developers, so if you like one app they made, you may want to look for other apps under their name and see if you like those too.

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