With all the thousands of mobile apps on the market today, you would hope there is a very easy way to find the ones that you want. Many copycat apps popup and get reviewed and leave the user confused as to which one might be the right one. After paying for and downloading you find out the app is not for you. Many app stores are adding app discovery engines so that related apps popup for users downloading specific apps. Well, now Google has made the search a little bit easier by adding a tool to Google Search that will help you filter out just mobile app search results.
If you use Google on a regular basis then this might be something you noticed right away. If you don’t use it much, there is a very easy way to filter the results. When you type in a search query the results popup and on the left hand side you see some options, one titled “search tools”. At the bottom of the list you see “more”, click that and a few less used options popup and one of the says “applications”. If you go ahead and click that, your Google search results will be rearranged to show just the mobile applications that are relevant to your search query.
Google will restrict the results shown to you to just apps that can be downloaded from the Apple App Store, the Android Market, AppBrain, AndroidZoom, CNet and many other third party app stores. For instance, if you were to search Google for the Ghost Radar app, you would get plenty of search results, including sponsored results that either review the app or show you where to buy the app. Once you restrict the search results to just “applications”, you will only see places where you can download or buy the application, making your search one step easier.
Google has been indexing results for iTunes and the Google Android Market for over a year now, so you might have seen those results for some time. Now it is just a little bit easier to narrow down your search. Google search will also let you restrict searches to find recipes, flights, blogs, discussions and patents if those are the topics you are searching for specifically. So if you haven’t tried Google Search to find apps, at least now it’s a little easier to do so.
