alloy
commented
9 years ago From @jessekedy:
I realize this is a many-headed beast that involves cross-team ko-lab-o-ration, and that some of this work may have already been done. Since the upside for Artsy could be pretty significant, I was hoping to get a sense of -
- who's managing the project (assuming @katarinabatina & @anipetrov)
- who's already done what / who owns which remaining tasks / whether the artsy.net team is looped in
- how Growth can support this
Below are the high level to-do's from the App Search Programming Guide (prerelease). Feel free to respond in-line below, or point to existing GH issues or Trello cards.
Search Fundamentals
Search in iOS 9 gives people great ways to access information inside of your app, even when it isn’t installed. When you make your content searchable, users can access activities and content deep within your app through Spotlight and Safari search results, Handoff, Siri Suggestions, and Reminders. Making your content searchable helps you enhance the user experience of your app and improve its discoverability.
Make Items Searchable
- Index Activities and Navigation Points
The NSUserActivity class provides methods that let you capture specific app states and navigation points that the user has previously visited and then restore them later using Handoff... - Index App Content
...When you use Core Spotlight APIs to make items searchable, you make it easy for users to find their content in Spotlight search results. - Mark Up Web Content
...Using web markup lets the Applebot web crawler index your content in Apple’s server-side index, which makes it available to all iOS users in Spotlight and Safari search results. - Support Universal Links
When you support universal links, iOS 9 users can tap a link to your website and get seamlessly redirected to your installed app without going through Safari. If your app isn’t installed, tapping a link to your website opens your website in Safari.
Enhance the Experience
- Combine APIs to Increase Coverage
...In your app, using multiple APIs often means that you index the same content in more than one way. On these occasions, it's crucial that you relate the various representations of a single item so that you can avoid giving users duplicate items in search results. Avoiding duplication can also help improve the ranking of your items. - Improve the Ranking of Your Results
iOS 9 users expect app search to give them the most relevant results, regardless of where the content comes from. To deliver the best user experience, iOS determines the quality and ranking of a searchable item by measuring:- The frequency with which users view your content (which is captured when you use NSUserActivity)
- The amount of engagement users have with your content (determined by the engagement ratio, which is based on the number of times users tap an item related to your app and the number of app-related items that are displayed in search results)
- The popularity of a URL in your website and the amount of structured data available
This makes it so that users can find Artsy content, provided by the app, in Spotlight (ie. the search bar on the home screen) and in Safari search results. People interested in art and thus searching for keywords in Safari will then also get Artsy content suggested instead of them going off to Google search results.
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/AppSearch/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016308
From reading the full App Search guide, it’s clear that we really have to support all the various components to get the best search results, as pointed out by @jessekedy in the “Enhance the Experience” section (see comment below).
Activities/Navigation:
NSUserActivityobject that’s publicly searchable, to indicate engagement with that particular entity content. Be sure to set thewebpageURLto the URL of the content on Force so that the search result gets properly counted for in Apple’s ranking system. (See this doc.)uniqueIdentifierandrelatedUniqueIdentifierto the URL of the content on Force so that the search result gets properly counted for in Apple’s ranking system. (See this doc.)Web Content:
/Martsywill have to allow theApplebotto crawl our site by amending therobots.txtfile.Applebotto crawl by amending therobots.txtfile./Martsyshould enrich search results by providing metadata as specified by schema.org and Open Graph metadata to specify title, description, and image data for the search results.