software-store-developers team mailing list archive

[Aaron Peachey <alpeachey@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

You may have seen the top-rated has been partially implemented (thanks
mvo) with a new carousel on the home screen. It may not quite be
working properly yet and otherwise still needs some work, but in the
mean time now that the server has histograms for all packages and this
means we now have a dampened rating for them all too, we thought it a
good time to take a look at the data to verify the usefulness of the
algorithm and I have attached a spreadsheet file with the rankings as
at today (Sat 23/7/11 Australian GMT+10).

It has had an interesting impact, as you can see in the spreadsheet,
by comparing each package's overall ranking against other packages
based on the dampened rating to the same ranking if we were using
average rating. I would definitely say that this algorithm seems to
provide a fairer approach to determining the 'top rated' apps but it
is interesting which apps fit into our top 12 (gparted at #1 is not
exactly what i was expecting!).
The other key is that the additional decimal precision of dampened
rating allows us to stop the plethora of apps with only 5 star ratings
from 'clogging' the top end without any differentiation between them
(except for alpha sort by package name), which they currently do if we
use average rating since all those with only votes of 5 immediately
float to the top and are unable to be differentiated from one another.

Will leave it at that for your discussion...

cheers
Aaron

Attachment: top-rated-analysis-23072011.ods
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet