I do so much searching in the Play Store on a daily basis that every little trick that helps surface relevant results faster and filter out things I don't want is worth its weight in gold. Sometimes, you're searching for XYZ, which you know should be in the title, but instead get a ton of results back with XYZ in the description. This is especially frustrating when a new app or game gets released, and Google hasn't figured out it's popular yet. In that case, it's more than likely that searching for the name of the app will show it somewhere near the last results page.

As it turns out, the Play Store supports the intitle: query operator, which is part of my regular Google-fu search arsenal. I don't think it used to work before, so I haven't tried it for a while, until today. It now works beautifully.

If you have multiple search terms and you know the right order, you should surround them with quotes, like so:

intitle:"foo bar"

If you know a few keywords but not necessarily the order, just include several intitle operators or use the allintitle operator, like so:

intitle:foo intitle:bar

or

allintitle:foo bar

Let's have a look.

intitle:"hulu":

And now without intitle. hulu:

Most of the time, the regular search without intitle will bring the results you're looking for at the top, so I don't expect everyone to suddenly start searching using intitle left and right. However, remember this tip when the time is right. I promise you, it'll come.


Now if someone knows how to specify a certain developer by name as part of the search query outside of just including it as a keyword, I'll be eternally grateful (developer: and author: don't work).

Update: We have a winner! The syntax is foo bar pub:"Publisher Name".