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Comment by frigg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is obviously a problem but let's not ignore the other elephant in the room. Here's a search for facebook* on google play. The only reason this post about Microsoft made it to the front page of HN is because of a negative thing about the Windows Phone store. And please don't tell me HN moderators don't remove posts about Microsoft, I just asked something about WP8 a few days ago and within 10 minutes it was removed. Others have complained about it as well. I wish HN would stop being so damn biased.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=facebook&c=apps

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I didn't see a single app in those search results that anyone would actually confuse for the real Facebook app. There are several which use obviously-modified versions of the Facebook app icon to indicate that they're like the Facebook app but somehow different, but none that seem to be actually claiming to be Facebook. Contrast with the windows store, where the first 12 results are all fake Facebook apps, and they don't even show you the publisher name, so there's literally no way to distinguish which one is the correct one.

Yes, the Google Play store has heaps of garbage apps as well (and worse), but at least other apps aren't permitted to directly copy and use Facebook's app icon, making their app indistinguishable from the official one.

And the Facebook app is written by Facebook. And it is the first one. So even on the basic search page, it is easy to figure out which one is the official one.

That's not to say the Play store doesn't drive me to distraction sometimes... I recently had to look at over a dozen flashlight apps to find one or two that weren't spamming me with ads and looking at my personal information.

Idea: a "premium" flag/badge set by human curators (GOOG/AAPL/MSFT employees). Then add an easy way of toggling "premium" searches, and voila, no more trash.

PS: Here's the Mac App Store 'Facebook' search: http://i.imgur.com/8o8mveb.png

The Google play store already has "top developer" and "editor's choice" badges that show up in search results.

About your screenshot - maybe I'm missing something, but where in the results is the official Facebook app? Do they hide already installed apps?

> I just asked something about WP8 a few days ago and within 10 minutes it was removed

I can't speak for others, but for me the Microsoft dominance has been a pain until I started mastering Linux. I am very happy if it is confirmed that HN actively removes links about Microsoft, just as a cold personal feeling of street justice. So it's not HN, it's the crowd of geeks.

On the other hand I don't see why HN would do that. Sounds like a loss of time and a PR risk. Maybe your content was average quality, maybe it wasn't cool enough, maybe it contained inappropriate contents. Please refer to the guidelines [1] to check whether your content had a chance to survive.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why would moderators remove a post because it mentions Microsoft? That doesn't make sense.

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