My first thought too.
Will this be used for the generic iTunes search? If I add "U2" to my app's list of keywords, would it turn up if someone searches for "U2" in iTunes? If so, this is open a lot of abuse..
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Apple Asking Developers to Submit Keywords to Facilitate App Store Searching
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My first thought too.
Will this be used for the generic iTunes search? If I add "U2" to my app's list of keywords, would it turn up if someone searches for "U2" in iTunes? If so, this is open a lot of abuse..
The app name is now also locked and can't be changed. Before people would update the app name to be something like (on sale) etc. I feel bad for them 
Agreed. But I think that I agree with the developers in that there should be a "Premium" section to the app store, where developers can have higher prices for higher quality apps. Maybe even raise the barriers to entry. The $99 developer fee and free SDK were great ideas when the App store was in it's infancy. Now it's an open invitation to produce mass quantities of crap. A $499/999 premium developer fee (with added benefits such as a limited number of expedited approvals) would really benefit the app store.
When it was announced, I was hoping that it wouldn't come to this. I really believed that the App store would be similar to the state of Mac apps (fewer but higher quality apps). It looks like I was wrong.
Some will abuse and misuse this feature and I'll get apps that have zero relevance to my search query.
255 characters of key words is way too much. If you allow too many keywords, then search results become cluttered with irrelevant results. Apple should limit the keywords to five keywords and no more than 19 letters per word.
I can see it now.
Loser Corp sues Apple for infringing on their patent for searching by keywords
While I understand the race to the bottom problem, I do not think it is easy to solve. Creating a 'Premium' section certainly would not do much, if its only differentiating criteria would be price. If I search for any term now, what stops me from only considering all $5+ apps with the intention to end up with a 'premium' app?
As long as you have a competitive market, prices will always tend to go down. That is the very idea behind competition. And the appstore is terribly competitive, low entry barriers ($99), global market. If a programmer from a low-wage country can offer an app cheaper and still make a living, its app will replace apps by more 'expensive' programmers.
If you feel that is exploitation of programmers by the customers, you would have to organize programmers for them to raise prices collectively. In industry terms that is called a cartel, for employees that is called a union. Unions are legal, cartels are not. Go figure.
Now, that is a useful approach. In essence, give good apps and programmers a way to differentiate themselves from others. A premium developer might be able to offer faster bug fixes because of the expedited approvals and thus command a higher price. But the key problem is still, how does a developer gain the reputation of offering faster bug fixes? Only over time, by word of mouth. Not by simple slapping a 'premium' label on them. A label without meaning is meaningless (sic).
Wait, how did users find apps before?
I don't have an iPhone or anything and I'm genuinely curious.
I don't have an iPhone or anything and I'm genuinely curious.
versiontracker.com
Macupdate.com
iusethis.com
www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
but mainly: google.com
And naturally recommendations (personal or by public). Even for iPhone apps, I might rather use Google than the Appstore. Out of the 50 iPhone applications I 'own', I found maybe two or three via the appstore.