I was a bit inspired by the recent Google developer day to do something about the poor results that some times come up when you search for pages in Launchpad.
There are a few specific fixes and I also added a few new facilities I hope you will think about using when you touch other pages: 1- canonical_url_recommended property on a view should be used when there are several pages at different URLs that have essentially the same content. "Essentially the same" is a bit subjective: it doesn't have to be byte-for-byte, but the real test is that a user would not want to get two or more pages that are essentially the same in their search results. So the same bug in different contexts is essentially the same; the same list of things with different sort orders is also essentially the same. 2- page_description can also be on a view (analogous to the title) and should return a "the most important text" on the page, if there is bulk text, suitable for putting in the description shown under the search result. For instance for a bug this is the bug description. If you have nothing to say, say nothing: returning hardcoded text like say "A list of branches" is probably bad. This shouldn't duplicate the title. <https://code.launchpad.net/~mbp/launchpad/meta-description/+merge/82769> 3- page_created, page_last_modified - (not added yet but I think I will) - if the page provides these, they will be mapped into schema.org metadata. 4- schema.org microformats - these need to be done in the page templates themselves; basically you give the page a bit of lightweight semantic markup to say "this is a date" or "this is a comment by person X on date Y." Google increasingly parses these out and uses them to generate better results and better snippets on the results. <https://code.launchpad.net/~mbp/launchpad/888353-microformats/+merge/82767> To some extent we're guessing how the black box of search engines will behave - in the first cut I'm trying to do something large enough we may see some difference without spending too much time or making too intrusive changes. All these are open standards. If they do help I hope you will think about using them on pages you touch too, so that searches across Launchpad are more useful to our users and so Launchpad's a better resource for the internet at large. What I am hoping for is: * Launchpad pages being higher ranked (when they're a good answer to the question) * Better snippets on the pages that do come up * Avoiding unwanted dupes in results * More 'rich snippets' coming up on lp pages -- Martin _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : launchpad-dev@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
