Why I don't like the new Chrome webstore | What about you?

6 points

15 years ago

At the end of October, Google launched a new Chrome webstore for extensions and applications developed for its browser. The idea was to provide a "new look" that would help to "quickly scan the store and find interesting things to try out" [1].

Although the new look is indeed more "catchy", there are (in my opinion) important issues that should be fixed or at least highlighted.

= 1) Search | I don't know if you tried recently to search for something in the new webstore, but results tend to be very irrelevant.

For instance, let's search for "Gmail" [2]. Results will display apps and extensions all together and more importantly results that do have nothing to do with the original query, e.g "Angry Birds", "Plants vs Zombies", "Turn Off the Lights". Clearly, the algorithm puts largely too much weight on the popularity or the number of users of an extension/app.

Now, let's be more precise, and let's search for "ad remover gmail" [3] - short story, I developed an extension for Gmail called "Ad Remover and Better UI for Gmail". Here, again the first result is irrelevant "MusicSig vkontakte"!! Why the latter extension appears in first position: (i) popular (>100'000 users) (ii)the words "removing ads" appear in its description. So, the new webstore algorithm seems to parse and take into account more than before the description of addons and extensions. Again, the weight of the parameter "description" should be far less than the one put on the "name" of the extension/app to avoid this kind of issues.

= 2) Navigation | The new first page uses tiles to present extensions/apps to the user. Basic information available at first glance are the name of the app/extension and number of stars. While it's good to attach the [1-5] stars-scale to indicate the "quality" of an extension/app, this measure seems a bit incomplete without indicating the number of users the extension/app has.

= 3) Screenshots | When you publish an extension in the new webstore, you must provide screenshots with a size of 1280x800 px. This size is pretty big and not very understandable, especially when you see that those screenshots are resized to half, ie 640x400px [4]. Why don't include a kind of lightbox functionality making possible for the user to click on a screenshot to enlarge it?

What do you think of the new webstore? Do you have any insights on the new search algorithm they put in place?

[1] Original blog post: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-chrome-even-more-app-ealing.html

[2] Search for "Gmail": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/gmail

[3] Search for "ad remover gmail": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/ad%20remover%20gmail?hl=en

[4] Screenshots example: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dheionainndbbpoacpnopgmnihkcmnkl