Chomp

» see chomp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed chomp. by the time i had my first iphone (a hand-me-down 4s in late 2012), chomp had already been swallowed by apple and turned off. my android usage before that had been on the google play store, where chomp's android app had been pulled a couple of months earlier as part of the same wind-down.

cathy edwards and ben keighran founded chomp in 2009 in san francisco. the pitch was that the app-store search bar was terrible. you knew you wanted a "flashlight" app or a "budget tracker" app but the built-in search returned games with those words in the metadata and nothing useful. chomp built a semantic index over the app catalog and let you search by function instead of by name.

chomp shipped an ios app in january 2011 and hit three hundred thousand users in the first eight weeks. android version followed a few months later. two and a half million dollars in seed and series a funding through 2011, tech-blog coverage on techcrunch and the verge writing about them as a fix for the app-discovery problem apple did not seem to be solving.

apple was, of course, paying attention. the acquisition announcement landed on 23 february 2012. reported price was around fifty million dollars, undisclosed officially. the entire chomp team moved into the app store engineering group in cupertino.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the whole product argument was that keyword-metadata search was the wrong retrieval model for an app store. a phrase like "expense tracker" needed to return apps that tracked expenses, not apps that had "expense" and "tracker" in their marketing copy. chomp built a category-and-function taxonomy that mapped natural-language queries onto real app behavior.

that taxonomy work was the ip apple actually wanted. the consumer chomp brand was almost incidental to the deal. by early 2012 apple's app store search was famously poor and google had begun using play-store search as a competitive lever against ios. buying chomp was a fast way to catch up on retrieval quality without hiring a whole search team from scratch.

~ the acqui-kill ~

within a few weeks of the acquisition, chomp for android was pulled from google play. that side of the product would have shipped ip to a competitor, which made it the first thing to go. the ios app and chomp.com kept working for a while, so users searching for iphone apps still got the semantic-search experience.

ios 6 shipped in september 2012 with a rebuilt app store search under the hood, using pieces of the chomp retrieval work. the ios chomp app was pulled and chomp.com became non-responsive within days. cathy edwards stayed on as a senior itunes engineer through april 2014. ben keighran moved into itunes marketing and later left for apple tv work.

~ the next chapter ~

the app store search in ios 6 was not immediately better in any way most users could name. it took another two years for the semantic-search improvements to become visible in the search-suggestion drop-down and in the featured-app rails. by then chomp itself was long forgotten as a brand.

the retrieval work outlived the brand. any time you typed a vague app description into the ios app store after 2014 and got back a plausible list of matching apps, you were using a distant descendant of what chomp had built in a small san francisco office three years earlier.

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