Inside iOS 9 Search

Slide from WWDC session on Search. Showing OpenGraph and schema..org metadata pulling into iOS 9 Search results.
Slide on web content from WWDC session on iOS Search.

Today on MacStories, Federico Viticci talks about iOS 9 Search. It turns out this is a really powerful feature.

Users can search for information, pulling in results from within the apps installed on their device as well as web sites. What does this mean for Web Developers? Federico explains:

Developers who own websites with content related to an app will be able to use Smart App Banners to describe deep links to an app (more on this in a bit) as well as open standards such as schema.org and Open Graph.

Apple calls these “rich results”: by reading metadata based on existing standards, Apple’s web crawler can have a better understanding of key information called out on a webpage and do more than simply parsing a title and a link. With support for schema.org, for instance, Applebot will be able to recognize tagged prices, ratings, and currencies for individual listings on Airbnb, while the Open Graph image tag could be used as the image thumbnail in iOS search results.

Apple just became a web search engine. The good news is, they are using all the existing standards that we should already be using (you have schema.org and OpenGraph meta on your site, right?). In theory, we shouldn’t have to do anything.

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