In watching a recent Android Developers Hangout recording that was posted to YouTube, there was quite a bit of discussion about the lack of analytics for app pages. This would be a very welcome feature but it got me thinking about another feature that would both be helpful and make it easier to live without analytics for the time being.

The feature I'm referring to is the ability to perform a Google search for inbound links to an app in the Android Market. For example, if a search for AppInspector returned a list of pages that linked to the Android Market page, that would be quite useful. While I'm sure there's a technical reason why this doesn't work, it doesn't really matter... it feels broken. Google has set the expectation that a link of the form https://market.android.com/details?id= will take you to the market page for the app. Shouldn't their search engine respect and reflect that when indexing inbound links?