Does it affect all apps, or just Hangouts specifically?

Can you install Hangouts from the Web Store?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-hangouts/knipolnnllmklapflnccelgolnpehhpl

Assigned to Abodenha for triage.

Moving this nonessential bug to the next milestone.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

mgiuca@ It is affecting only Hangouts app. 

I could install Hangouts from web store. Unable to install only from app launcher.

Is this only happening on quawks?

gkihumba@ Not specific to quawks. Repro'd on other devices as well

Adding release block beta as this is pretty bad. Hope fix can be in next beta release next Tue 6/28

 sdantuluri@: have you seen this in previous builds or is a regression?

This is a regression. 

OK I figured out what's going on. The app you are trying to install is "Hangouts Chrome" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts-chrome/imbdlpecbbjkddpcfcjhkeadjcilkihp), which is a third-party app by "Mark" that is not by Google.

If you try to manually install this app from the Web Store link above, you get "Package is invalid. Details: 'Could not load extension icon 'icon/128.png'.'."

So there's quite a lot of problems here:
1. The first search result for "Hangouts" in the app list is a third-party Hangouts wrapper.
2. The official Google Hangouts (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-hangouts/knipolnnllmklapflnccelgolnpehhpl) is not showing up in a search for "Hangouts".
3. The Launcher doesn't display installation errors if the package is invalid. It just fails silently.

What do you mean by "regression" in this case? What behaviour were you seeing previously? Which exact app ID were you able to install previously?

If you search for "Google Hangouts", you get the right app and can install it successfully. So the main issue is that "Google Hangouts" is not showing up in a search for "Hangouts".

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/jsonsearch?q=Hangouts (the URL used internally for this query) does include Google Hangouts. It's possible that our internal ranking system is demoting it because the word Hangouts is not at the start of the title. I will investigate.

I will file a separate bug for #3 (which I don't really expect to fix; the value is not worth the cost) and investigate #1.

Filed https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=622971 for the failed installation.

I looked at the results for the query "Hangouts". We get three results from the webstore endpoint:

Google Hangouts (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/knipolnnllmklapflnccelgolnpehhpl); relevance = 0.96875
Hangouts Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imbdlpecbbjkddpcfcjhkeadjcilkihp); relevance = 0.996094
Hangouts Arcade (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mblmaggjclkbdnbfnfiikijmmbbhoekf); relevance = 0.996094

Note: The relevance scores are *not* supplied by the webstore; they are calculated client-side using this:
https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/ui/app_list/search/tokenized_string_match.cc?l=201

The Hangouts Chrome and Hangouts Arcade have higher scores because the word "Hangouts" appears at the front. This is an explicit design choice (a prefix match is ranked more highly than a substring match).

Couple of options:
1. Just leave it alone.
2. Make suffix matches equal weighting to prefix matches (could have unintended side effects).
3. Apply bonus points to results based on the order they arrive from the Webstore endpoint.

For #3, I'm not sure, but I think the Webstore is giving us results in preferred order (possibly calculating, much better than we can, the popularity and relevance on the server side). It doesn't give us the scores, though, so we currently ignore the order and calculate our own relevance. We could give a higher score to results that come earlier in the Webstore results list. Again, this could have unintended side effects.

I can easily make any of these changes but I don't have time to do experiments or carefully examine the consequences of doing so. (Therefore I am tempted to just leave it.) It depends how important the web store installation through Launcher flow is on Chrome OS.

Removing RBS and lowering priority, as this is just a ranking issue.

We probably should work with jawag@ on issue 575926, where CWS would provide some ranking info and combine that into to the score to fight with spam.

Yes, let's work together on issue 575926. +ashmatt FYI

I filed  Issue 622971  for problem number 3.

Since mgiuca@ filed another issue for our failing silently, the only thing that remains for this bug is that we are returning apps/extensions starting with the name "Hangouts" when the user searches for "Hangouts". That sounds like exactly what we should be doing.

Marking as WontFix since this is WAI.