Google’s search results in the Play Store have always been a bit confusing. The search results are typically pretty bad, and makes it tough for users to find the app they are looking for, especially if they don’t know the name of the app. Which is pretty surprising, given the fact that Google powers the search engine in the Play Store. But they have been making search in the Play Store a bit better, over the past few years. And now another popular feature from Google’s search engine is coming to the Play Store, and that it search suggestions – or at least it is being tested.
From time to time, Google will push out some features to the Play Store that they are testing. And only a handful of users will actually get it. The latest feature they are testing appears to be search suggestions. It’s similar to when you’re searching on Google.com, say you type in “Android”, you’ll then get suggestions for things like “Android Nougat” or “Android Studio”. The same thing is coming to the Play Store. As you can see from the screenshot below, the user searched for “screen record” and the suggestions below show terms that could follow it, to get a better list of results, like “screen record for YouTube” or “screen record no root”. This should make things much easier to find a specific app, or even discover new apps.
The screenshot below was sent to Android Police, and virtually no one else has gotten the same results (we don’t see it on any of our devices here either). Which means that this is in a very limited test. That also means that Google may or may not continue on with this feature. So we may see it in a future update to the Google Play Store, but it is also possible that it never comes to the Google Play Store, officially. That means we should be taking this with a grain of salt, but it wouldn’t be that surprising to see search suggestions come to the Google Play Store, after all it is already a big part of Google’s search engine.
