Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?
Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it.
The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query.
I'm a gamer, so let's look at games. Typically, for my 360 and PC, I'm well aware of new games that are on the horizon. Big name publishers and even the smaller ones typically receive publicity well in advance of release, and on release day/week there is usually something I can find on metacritic that someone else has written about that game.
OTOH, in the App Store, I have very little idea on the quality of gameplay for new games released that day. Finding reviews outside of the App Store for games developed by one-man-shops is incredibly difficult.
Take the game "Red Conquest" as an example. I heard about it in an online web forum. I never saw it in any App Store category list, and a search for the term "RTS" is bound to contain so much fluff that I still wouldn't have found it. It's a game that I think exemplifies the lost-in-the-shuffle problem in the App Store. (FWIW, I love this game. It's brutally hard, but you can tone down the difficulty to make it manageable. Small things, like the fact that it boots in less than 5 seconds, or that it has bluetooth/wifi multiplayer, make a big difference).
To summarize, it's difficult to search using the search box because you don't know what you're looking for.
