Android market search by publisher broken?

Question

Many apps just broke, perhaps google changed something? The documentation at http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/publishing.html says that

  <URI_prefix>search?q=pub:<publisher_name>

should work, and was working until very recently. Is anyone else having problems with this? Using a market:// link? It is giving No Results Found, and I tried for other publishers also. Is something wrong with my Google Play app perhaps, or is this affecting everyone? Perhaps they broke something moving over to Google Play?

Thank You

Answer 1

UPDATE: The documentation seems to have been fixed now. Thanks to @Meh for pointing that out in his comment.

To create the link, you need to know your publisher name, which is available from the Developer Console.

From a web site:

http://play.google.com/store/search?q=pub:

From an Android app:

market://search?q=pub:<publisher_name>

Here's an example:

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=pub:Google Inc.

For details on how to send the link in an Android app, see Linking from an Android App.

PREVIOUS ANSWER:

I found what was causing your trouble. When using a publishers name specifically, it now needs to be case sensitive. For instance, this works: http://play.google.com/store/search?q=pub:Zynga

but this doesn't: http://play.google.com/store/search?q=pub:zynga

However, if you're just searching for zynga generically, it still works even when your search term is all lower case. http://play.google.com/store/search?q=zynga

The behavior is so inconsistent now. I'd say this is a bug (or if not a bug, this quirky behavior should at least be clarified in the documentation).