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Introducing Search APIs (709)

Overview

  • Developers choose what to index via Search APIs
  • App results appear in both Spotlight and Safari
  • Public deeplinks will show up for apps the user hasn’t installed

App / Content Discovery

  1. Content indexed in devices that is marked as public gets promoted to the cloud index based on amount of usage/engagement
  2. Content is also scraped from app websites

App Search API

NSUserActivity

Extension of the iOS 8 handoff API. As you expose NSUserActivities past behavior gets automatically indexed

CoreSpotlight

Manually expose app content. Best way to index private content.

Web markup

Apps that mirror content on website, can be marked up so they get scraped and deep links work

NSUserActivity

  • Capture application state for use in handoff
  • New in iOS 9
    • Add indexable metadata
    • Activities can be designated as searchable
    • Results show up in search

Usage

Track content that user has viewed, with metadata that will help index the content.

API usage

Capability flags

eligibleForHandoff, eligibleForSearch, eligibleForPublicIndexing

Indexed Properties

title, keywords, contentAttributeSet: CSSearchableItemAttributeSet?, expirationDatae

Web URL

webpageURL if its possible to resume from website set this

Continue

application:continueUserActivity:userInfo:

Public Indexing

NSUserActivity can be marked as public indexing, if so every time the user “interacts” with the content it increases rank until its promoted to “cloud index”

One way hash of every activity is sent to cloud index and then after threshold the public item is shared. For privacy but also filtering for interest

Benefits

  • Will get siri suggestions and reminders (“remind me about this”)
  • Handoff

CoreSpotlight

API

CSSearchableItem

Collection of item attributes (CSSearchableItemAttributeSet) to index

CSSearchableItemAttributeSet

Attributes that are indexed/displayed by spotlight

CSSearchableIndex

Collection of CSSearchableItem(s) added to device index

Restoration

Uses the same api as the handoff api

Web Markup

Powered by Applebot, crawls the web and provides search results for deep links (I think this is based on smart banner tags since they said this already works)

Enable app search

  1. Markup mobile web for deep links (submit as support/marketing url with app)
  2. Ensure app can handle deep links
  3. Add additional markup for structured results to improve search result UI

Universal links

Unique since its identified by domain/website, secure, flexible. Register the links in app and then markup the pages with the tags via smart app banner/“other standards”

Third party support

Supports twitter cards and facebook app links. Handles og:image/audio/video markup for structured data to improve appearance of results. They support lots of this.

Achieving Best Results

Relevance

Important attribute of ranking is the amount of interaction

  1. URL popularity (relevance score)
  2. Activities (NSUserActivity)
  3. Engagements - When search result is presented Should have 3-5 Keywords per item, include aliases or common nicknames