There is some suspicion going around that Google has tweaked the ranking algorithm that it uses on the Android Market. The evidence that the rankings have been tweaked come by way of Geoff Cook, the CEO of a social networking site called myYearbook that has an app on the Android Market.
According to Cook before March 24, his app suddenly moved from number 63 up to number 11 in the top Free social category on the market. Those numbers come from the Android App Tracker. Some other apps also jumped up significantly in the rankings as well including Seesmic moving from 39 to 10 and Gowalla going from 78 to 18 in the same app category.
At the same time, other apps from myYearbook like Tic Tac Toe dropped a lot. Cook thinks that the reason for the big changes come down to an algorithm change that favors app stickiness. He thinks that Tic Tac Toe dropped because it doesn’t have the same length of engagement as the myYearbook app.
[via Gigaom]
The full link to the Android App Tracker is http://androidapptracker.com. full ranking stats on all ranked apps on the market which is around 50k atm with Google maxing out its ranks per category to 800. They also have Hot Apps page which shows the apps with the biggest movement in position.