How does web markup metadata relate to CSSearchableItemAttributeSet attributes?

We can publicly index app content using the Web Markup API and also the NSUserActivity API. Apple tells us that the search rankings are improved when the user activity is invoked, therefore at our company we are using both API's.


I can populate the search result metadata from inside the app by using the CSSearchableItemAttributeSet attributes. For example, contentRating. However the public website is also adding metadata for this universal link but by using a different set of attributes, those specified by the schema.org. For example, https://schema.org/ratingValue


These two sets of metadata do not have a 1:1 correspondence. How does Apple choose between them if they are different? What is the point in providing the metadata from the NSUserActivity API if it's already provided by the site?

Replies

It doesn't answer your question but there are bits in the new guide:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/AppSearch/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016308-CH4-SW1

The validator also has some reference... although its fairly obvious:

https://search.developer.apple.com/appsearch-validation-tool


Will be watching your question, hopefully we can get more details.

My understanding at this point is that if you have a web page with rating in its markup, and then you have a corresponding NSUserActivity (that's using the same webpageURL as the page where the markup exists), then we would prefer the local information on the NSUserActivity. I'd be curious to know if that's the results you see. If it's not, this is probably worthy of a bug to get some clarification around what you should be expecting.

Definitely surfacing the data that is specified locally (in-app). To date, I haven't seen any direct evidence that the web markup data is being used directly. Should I be?