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Hi there.
My name is Ibrahim Elbouchikhi.
I'm a product manager on the Google Play Store.
And today I want to talk to you about what's new in Google Play
app discovery.
Be together, not the same.
This is the Android campaign that's going on right now.
It signifies the diversity of the ecosystem-- the fact
that our users stem from so many different countries,
speak different languages, have different interests,
use different devices, et cetera.
And this particular diversity makes it both a challenge
and an opportunity for us to build a great discovery
experience.
So I'm going to tell you a bit more about it today.
But first, I want to quantify this diversity.
We have over a billion users.
They come from over 190 countries, speak 63 languages,
and issue over 400 million unique search terms each month.
Now think about that again.
These are 400 million search terms.
Different interests, different queries, different needs,
different questions.
The user coming to the Play Store to find
apps that they could satisfy.
So that's really exciting to us, and that just signifies,
again, the diversity of the ecosystem.
With an ecosystem this diverse, how do you
enable organic discovery?
We think of it in three buckets.
First is enabling discovery through search.
Search is one of the key ways that users
discover apps on Google Play.
Second is personalizing the browse experience.
And finally, it's about enabling exploration,
which is slightly different than personalization,
as I'll get into later.
So let's talk about search.
Traditionally, search is a ranking problem.
It's about getting the most relevant app
at the top of the list.
And over the past year, we've invested significant resources
in making sure that Google Play Store
search is incredibly relevant.
But we also took a step back and thought about new ways
to serve results on Google Play.
And so we came up with this new experience,
where results, the organic results,
are clustered around topics and concepts that
are easily relatable to users.
And this does two things.
First, it helps users narrow their intent faster.
They can easily browse, scroll up and down,
and see which of those subconcepts
are actually relevant to their query.
Second, it helps users understand
the range of options and a range of apps that
are available on Google Play.
This experience, obviously, only works
well for queries that are very broad-- areas
that you can actually break down into subconcepts.
So look for us to continue to invest in this
and roll it out further.
From our experiments, we have seen
that this experience drives a greater total number
of installs from more unique apps,
and very importantly, by more unique developers.
All really, really good things for our ecosystem.
So let's talk about personalizing the store.
One of the insights we've had is that there's really
no average user when you have an ecosystem like ours.
We have over a billion users, and they issue 400 million
search terms each month.
You really don't have a prototypical user or interest
you can design for.
And in fact, if you build a product for the average,
you will most likely end up with a suboptimal experience.
So we invested a lot in making sure
that the Play Store is relevant and highly personal
to our users.
We think of it as one user, one store.
And so if you're a user interested
in hiking and fitness, you may see this Play Store.
If you're someone who's interested in learning
new languages and photography, you may see this one.
And most importantly, we've learned
that personalization really drives an increase in installs,
and in fact doubles the likelihood that a user will
install an app.
This is intuitive.
If you see something that's relevant to you,
you're more likely to install it.
But the magnitude of the improvement
is what's really interesting here.
So as you build your apps, your experiences,
I recommend looking at personalization
as a way to drive an increase in growth, just like we did here
on the Play Store.
Finally, let's touch on enabling exploration.
Exploration is different than personalization.
Exploration tries to be a bit more tangential.
If you've installed a number of apps of this type,
I'm going to give you a few apps that are slightly different.
And that's what we're trying to grow and do
more of on the Play Store-- broaden users' interests
and help them explore more.
Over the past year, we've launched e-developer pages.
These are home pages for developers on the Play Store.
And what this does is, if a user is browsing a developer's
app details page, they will see a collection,
a rich collection, that when they click on,
they go to this home page.
In here, they see a featured app by the developer.
Then they see all of their apps.
They can then navigate to one of those apps,
discover a similar app, and so on.
This continuous cycle of discovery and browsing
and pivots is really healthy for the product
and enables exploration we wanted to invest in more.
Next is Google Play for Families, which we also
launched this year.
Families are an important segment for Google Play,
and offering them a discovery experience
that helps them find apps is really, really important to us.
One of the neat experiences we built is this character picker.
For example, if your kids are obsessed with Superman or Dora,
you can easily come here and see the icon
for that particular character-- probably
the same way they're dressed-- and find
apps and games and books and movies that are
relevant to them very easily.
This is a really fun discovery experience for parents.
Finally, look for us to invest more
in context-based discovery.
Whether time-based or location-based,
we'll look to aggregate apps based on that context
and serve them up to users just at the right time
or the right place.
Whether it's living in New York or Mumbai
or whether it's the weekend or the evening,
we'll start serving up more of these apps to our users.
It's another way, again, to drive exploration of the store.
Thank you so much for listening, and stay
tuned to the Google Developer channel for more content.
Thank you.
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