Ask HN: How to let Google know that my app name isn't a misspelling?
We launched about three weeks ago, with an open beta for two weeks, and a public launch about 5 days go. During the open beta, we couldn't find our app in any of the Google Play Stores by searching for the name, but we put that down to it being an open beta. After our public launch, we discovered that while a search for 'Ochat' (without quotation marks) didn't work, a search for '"Ochat"' with quotation marks did work. That was unexpected to me as I have always understood that a single word search string is identical to a quoted single word search string.
That got us to do some more investigating, and it turns out that Google consider our company name to be a misspelling of the word "chat", and so on Google play automatically shows the results for "chat" instead of "Ochat", even when the only thing that someone searches for is our name. Okay, that hurt, as we put in a lot of effort into launching before the holiday season and creating a lot of holiday specific content.
We followed that up with some more checking on the Google Play Store, and found a number of other apps with names that follow a similar structure to ours, but much lower ratings, downloads, and almost no internationalisation. Names like "ichat", "uchat", and "echat" which the Google Play Store doesn't consider to be misspellings.
We've since managed to get hold of Google Play's support, and their solution is to teach our users to use quotation marks when searching for an app name. Even if we could and wanted to, I'm not sure how we would even go about doing that.
Does anyone have any suggestions or experience as to how we can get this resolved so that every non-quoted search for our app name isn't treated as a misspelling?