Xyologic has released the closed beta of its new Android search engine. The Berlin-based startup, which offers a new way to discover apps, also announced an investment round of an undisclosed sum involving Rick Thompson’s Signia Venture Partners, Klaas Kersting and SoundCloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss.
The company boasts that it harnesses new and powerful technologies to offer users an innovative type of app exploration experience. It has spent 18 months gathering data on how users search for apps, including what they type. This has helped the Xyologic team to build a search engine for mobile apps which can understand vaguely-expressed user queries.
Co-founder Zoe Adamovicz said: “We don’t claim to ‘solve’ any of the big issues of our industry. But we believe we have some new, better answers.”
According to Zoe’s fellow co-founder Matthaus Krzykowski, less than 5 percent of mobile app searches are for brands like Zynga or Angry Birds, while more than 80 percent of users input genres like ‘puzzle games’ or ‘music.’
“This is where some of our technology comes in,” added the third co-founder, Marcin Rudolf. “We have found a way to identify hundreds of groups of similar apps and games. This allows us to show these mobile app and game genres as possible choices to our users.”
The Xyologic team claim their platform has the most extensive choice for users through its unique Natural App category which identifies more than 70 app and 100 game genres. There is also a formula that puts some of the best undiscovered apps on top of the search result rankings. Features like App Sentiments, meanwhile, allow users to evaluate the quality of an app.
Rick Thompson, one of the new investors and founder of Playdom, said: “Xyologic’s app search is the first search designed from the ground up for mobile games.” Fellow investor and Gameforge founder Klaas Kersting said: “The team is doing great work around some of the key challenges for our industry.”
The money will be used to speed up the rollout of Xylogic’s app search for other mobile platforms including iOS.