Apple’s User Action Search Engine
At WWDC 2015 Apple introduced three new search index APIs. These three tools are meant to provide appropriate information to Spotlight so that native app content can be indexed and web content can deep link to native apps.
Two of these tools work as you would expect. Apple will now index URLs using Open Graph and Schema.org and show results in Spotlight and Safari. Core Spotlight can be used to index local content and results will show up in Spotlight.
The third tool is completely different. Apple has extended NSUserActivity (which has been used for Handoff) with a property named eligibleForPublicIndexing. This simple addition provides a completely new way of discovering native content.
The documentation of eligibleForPublicIndexing describes it in a typical Apple fashion:
A Boolean value that indicates if the activity can be added to a public index that can inform searches by any user of your app on any device.
What is revolutionary here is that we have a native app publishing user activities to a public index. Unlike Google which indexes content based on links from other web sites, Apple is now indexing user actions and using that to surface relevant information.
It feels like something that Facebook would have introduced. But Facebook search is limited to content inside Facebook which limits the kinds of data that appears in their index.
Apple on the other hand is trying to index all native app content as well as any web based content they can. Users spend most of their time inside native applications which means Apple’s index could rival Google in terms of total indexed content. Spotlight also has access to local, private data, Apple can include that content as well. All this data will be able to link inside native apps further speeding up the user experience.
We will have to wait and see if iOS users and developers actually use these tools. We know from past projects that Apple’s search algorithms can feel underwhelming compared to Google. But given input that Apple will be using to power their search tools they may finally have a leg up over their competitors.
