As for the first part of your reply, trust me, I completely agree. We have done nothing for the past week except tweak our market text, change our name to various things, and so forth to figure out how to work with the new system. We are not just watching it idly and going "OH WOE IS ME!".
The problem is that it is not a level playing field. Extremely popular apps, not just ours, are appearing hundreds of results away while other extremely popular applications are staying right up in the front. It really seems kind of random. Why are some extremely popular apps in the first results, then hundreds of crappy / average apps, then more exceptional applications? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
My post is a bit of a rant, I admit, but it is also meant to be informative so that other developers can see what it means to play in the market.
for an exact search on our app we were 50 out of 50 with the other results being totally unrelated.
it seems as of yesterday they sort of fixed the problem and were ranking first for our terms. have u seen any improvement?
the last 2 weeks have been stressfull!!
I think you missed this line. Presumably they were doing quite well for themselves, got nailed by some change Google made, and now are not recouping any costs due to all the lost sales.
Sadly, bryanlarsen is correct about Google's culture, especially when it comes to the code they've written: the search code is doing what we told it to and there won't be any reconsideration of decisions made about code.
google has access to more valuable data here than they do with web searches. if the majority of users search for "shopping list" and end up installing 5 different apps, which do they usually keep installed? rank that one higher for future searches. you can't fake the number of app installs like spammers can gain junk inbound links for pagerank.
the algorithm was totally broken. luckily for most of us they started fixing it yesterday and today.
My bigger question is how is a $5 app that #2 in its category for paid apps struggling to be profitable (especially since I believe the top paid list are counted by installs)? All of your complaints seem to be about competing with other apps, but you seem to be mostly winning that competition. Are Android app sales so low that #2 in its category app is unprofitable?