Thursday, August 26, 2010

Demystifying the app ranking criteria in orkut

Over the months, we’ve had many requests to explain the way we rank applications in the orkut directory. Developers often wonder why one of their very popular apps doesn’t appear as high up in the directory as they believe it should. Well, it’s not exactly magic but simple math, and we wanted to share with you how our algorithm works out the rankings.

As you’d expect, we rely heavily on stats that tell us not only the number of users who have installed your app but also the number of users who actively use it. The number of installations is further broken down into the number of weekly as well as total installs. We hope you’ll agree that counting the number of users who uninstall your app is also crucial, since that is an indication of which apps didn’t live up to user expectations in some way and could be improved, and we lower the ranking score by a few points to account for the weekly uninstalls.

However, it’s not enough to judge the popularity of an application by the number of its installations alone – how often it actually gets rendered is a definite index of how addictive, useful and well-designed it is, and you can surely expect us to feed those numbers back into the formula, too!

Besides these, we think apps that users find good enough to put up on their home page should be given some weight, thus the number of weekly renders of those apps in profile view figures into our calculations too. We then add one last parameter to this equation: a popularity index that is a function of the weekly renders of each app over the number of it’s total installations.

In short, the formula looks something like this:

Total Score = Base Score + Popularity Score

where
Base Score = Score (total installs) + Score (weekly installs, adjusted for weekly uninstalls) + Score (weekly renders in canvas and profile views)

and
Popularity Score = Score(weekly renders / total installs)

We hope this gives you a clue to the “mystery”. We look forward to hearing your comments and feedback on the forum!

6 comments:

  1. Hellow!Olá!Saudações!Passei a seguir o Google Code,asim como irei divulgá-lo,pois tenho certeza de que ~este,assim como os demais produtos oferecidos pela Coogle,são de altíssimo nível,e excelente qualidade!Parabéns!Sucesso!Abraços Cordiais a todos!Luiz Aurelio Nogueira-terapeuta holístico-João Pessoa-Paraíba,Brasil.

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  2. hello orkut.. first let me admit the truth .. i was a orkut user for 3 years then i deleted my account only because of so much nudity here . but now i m here again and it feels home again .. i want to ask something about orkut apps . i have used facebook . and there is nothing interesting about facebook . so why is this big talk about facebook everywhere . why not orkut . only because they have zynga .. sir nothing against orkut . i wud love to see orkut at top .u have games on orkut . but they r not at top yet .. i have few ideas . i dont know how it will effect on ppl .. but i m sure it can creat news . start a combat game on orkut .. there r lots of famous games . apart from spending money on lots of apps u can create just ten games app to attract ppl . google is not a small network . its huge and capable too . whats Zynga creating . just some bunch of social games. they r creating small things . like thinking of a farmer they created farmville . and other games r like that too .. just ideas matter u know it too . some small and interesting ideas .. u can create too . plz think on this . plz respond to my msg plz

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  3. Orkut new version is too worst.orkut features are not working properly try to solve this if not orkut users will go to other sites

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  4. Why its not possible to share things using the Orkut Promote (API) ?

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  5. ENGINEERS & TRUE FRIENDS ALWAYS ROCKS

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  6. I´m from brazil and i have something to say!
    You guys are fucking (actually already did) the old and good orkut, all my friends are stopping to use it because the new version, to cofuse! They all are using facebook because orkut is getting similar to it, the only diference is the "communities"..
    I hate facebook, and loved the old orkut.. but facebook istill is better then the new orkut!

    Shame on google, I get vry hppy when I knew about google interest on orkut, google has so much good tools.. but orkut where better without it!

    Sincerely

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