There’s probably an app for that — whatever “that” may be. With countless applications available for web and mobile, the challenge lies in finding the right ones. Now, Quixey — a search engine for apps, 18 months in the making — seeks to find them for you.
Quixey is lifting the veil on its fully automated, self-described “functional search” engine for applications Tuesday. Instead of simply searching for an application by its developer-generated description, the user can search and discover apps by Quixey-defined functions.
Tell Quixey what you want to do — see sports scores, edit video, find cheap gas, etc. — and the search engine will return results, ranked by relevance, with all of the web, Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Firefox, IE and Chrome apps that match your query.
You can filter the results by type, or by associated platform — say, for instance, you’re only in search of applications that remove redeye and plug in to Flickr (as the photo illustrates). On the right-hand side of the page, Quixey displays system-generated text for each app that attempts to inform you whether the app lives up to its stated purpose.
The startup grabs app information from forums, blogs, social media sites and additional unnamed sources in an effort to return the highest quality results. Quixey’s keeping mum on exactly how it goes about indexing applications and defining its search algorithms — in part because it took the seven-person team a year-and-a-half to build the new technology to collect data on apps — but app popularity, rating and download figures all factor into the secret formula.
Some queries are better than others. Enter “Identify music,” and Shazam and SoundHound appear at the top as they should. But search for “stream music” or “play music” and the top applications that come to mind are outranked by several odd selections. Clearly, a few kinks still need to be worked out.
Co-founder Tomer Kagan says that Quixey will be adding a machine learning layer to help improve its app search engine in the months ahead.
“We’ve only completed three to five percent of what’s on our road map,” he says, “but we’re already getting amazing results.”
Kagan also discloses that Quixey will soon be launching developer pages to provide app developers with access to the data Quixey has unearthed on their apps. The goal is to ultimately help developers figure out how best to get their applications discovered.
The startup is also in talks with potential partners interested in a white label version of the search engine for their app stores. Quixey especially sees opportunity in the multitude of Android app stores in development by device manufacturers.
Quixey recently raised $400,000 in a seed round led by Eric Schmidt’s personal fund Innovation Endeavors, and Archimedes Ventures.
Mashable has exclusively obtained 500 Quixey invites for our readers. Interested parties can click on the “Want an invite link” here to get private beta access to Quixey’s app search engine.
via mashable.com
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