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Seo Master present to you:
By Yang Li, Research Scientist

Gesture Search from Google Labs now has an API. You can use the API to easily integrate Gesture Search into your Android apps, so your users can gesture to write text and search for application-specific data. For example, a mobile ordering application for a restaurant might have a long list of menu items; with Gesture Search, users can draw letters to narrow their search.


Another way to use Gesture Search is to enable users to select options using gestures that correspond to specific app functions, like a touch screen version of keyboard shortcuts, rather than forcing hierarchical menu navigation.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how we can embed Gesture Search (1.4.0 or later) into an Android app that enables a user to find information about a specific country. To use Gesture Search, we first need to create a content provider named CountryProvider, according to the format required by Android Search framework. This content provider consists of 238 country names.

Then, in GestureSearchAPIDemo, the main activity of the app, we invoke Gesture Search when a user selects a menu item. (Gesture Search can be invoked in other ways depending on specific applications.) To do this, we create an Intent with the action "com.google.android.apps.gesturesearch.SEARCH" and the URI of the content provider. If the data is protected (for example, see AndroidManifest.xml), we also need to grant read permission for the content URI to Gesture Search. We then call startActivityForResult to invoke Gesture Search.

public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
    super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
    menu.add(0, GESTURE_SEARCH_ID, 0, R.string.menu_gesture_search)
        .setShortcut('0', 'g').setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_menu_search);
    return true;
  }

  @Override
  public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
    switch (item.getItemId()) {
      case GESTURE_SEARCH_ID:
        try {
          Intent intent = new Intent();
          intent.setAction("com.google.android.apps.gesturesearch.SEARCH");
          intent.setData(SuggestionProvider.CONTENT_URI);
          intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_GRANT_READ_URI_PERMISSION);
          intent.putExtra(SHOW_MODE, SHOW_ALL);
          intent.putExtra(THEME, THEME_LIGHT);
          startActivityForResult(intent, GESTURE_SEARCH_ID);
        } catch (ActivityNotFoundException e) {
          Log.e("GestureSearchExample", "Gesture Search is not installed");
        }
        break;
    }
    return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
  }

In the code snippet above, we also specify that we want to show all of the country names when Gesture Search is brought up by intent.putExtra(SHOW_MODE, SHOW_ALL). The parameter name and its possible values are defined as follows:

/** 
   * Optionally, specify what should be shown when launching Gesture Search.
   * If this is not specified, SHOW_HISTORY will be used as a default value.
   */
  private static String SHOW_MODE = "show";
  /** Possible values for invoking mode */
  // Show the visited items
  private static final int SHOW_HISTORY = 0;
  // Show nothing (a blank screen)
  private static final int SHOW_NONE = 1;
  // Show all of date items
  private static final int SHOW_ALL = 2;

  /**
   * The theme of Gesture Search can be light or dark. 
   * By default, Gesture Search will use a dark theme.
   */
  private static final String THEME = "theme";
  private static final int THEME_LIGHT = 0;
  private static final int THEME_DARK = 1;

  /** Keys for results returned by Gesture Search */
  private static final String SELECTED_ITEM_ID = "selected_item_id";
  private static final String SELECTED_ITEM_NAME = "selected_item_name";

As you can see in the code, when Gesture Search appears, we can show a recently selected country name, or nothing. Gesture Search then appears with a list of all the country names. The user can draw gestures directly on top of the list and a target item will pop up at the top. When a user taps a country name, Gesture Search exits and returns the result to the calling app. The following method is invoked for processing the user selection result, reading the Id and the name of the chosen data item.

@Override
  protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
    if (resultCode == Activity.RESULT_OK) {
      switch (requestCode) {
        case GESTURE_SEARCH_ID:
          long selectedItemId = data.getLongExtra(SELECTED_ITEM_ID, -1);
          String selectedItemName = data.getStringExtra(SELECTED_ITEM_NAME);
          // Print out the Id and name of the item that is selected 
          // by the user in Gesture Search
          Log.d("GestureSearchExample", selectedItemId + ": " + selectedItemName);
          break;
      }   
    }
  }

To use the Gesture Search API, you must be sure Gesture Search is installed. To test this condition, catch ActivityNotFoundException as shown in the above code snippet and display a MessageBox asking the user to install Gesture Search.

You can download the sample code at http://code.google.com/p/gesture-search-api-demo.

Yang Li builds interactive systems to make information easily accessible anywhere anytime. He likes watching movies and spending quality time with his family.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

2013, By: Seo Master

salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines your preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It’s supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you’d like displayed in search results. However, rel=canonical can be a bit tricky because it’s not very obvious when there’s a misconfiguration.


We recommend the following best practices for using rel=canonical:

• A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.

One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines.

• Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”)
• Verify the rel=canonical target doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag
• Make sure you’d prefer the rel=canonical URL to be displayed in search results (rather than the duplicate URL)
• Include the rel=canonical link in either the <head> of the page or the HTTP header
• Specify no more than one rel=canonical for a page. When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored.

Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series

Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages:

• example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1
• example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2
• and so on

Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all.


In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup.



Mistake 2: Absolute URLs mistakenly written as relative URLs


The <link> tag, like many HTML tags, accepts both relative and absolute URLs. Relative URLs include a path “relative” to the current page. For example, “images/cupcake.png” means “from the current directory go to the “images” subdirectory, then to cupcake.png.” Absolute URLs specify the full path—including the scheme like http://.

Specifying <link rel=canonical href=“example.com/cupcake.html” /> (a relative URL since there’s no “http://”) implies that the desired canonical URL is http://example.com/example.com/cupcake.html even though that is almost certainly not what was intended. In these cases, our algorithms may ignore the specified rel=canonical. Ultimately this means that whatever you had hoped to accomplish with this rel=canonical will not come to fruition.

Mistake 3: Unintended or multiple declarations of rel=canonical

Occasionally, we see rel=canonical designations that we believe are unintentional. In very rare circumstances we see simple typos, but more commonly a busy webmaster copies a page template without thinking to change the target of the rel=canonical. Now the site owner’s pages specify a rel=canonical to the template author’s site.


Another issue is when pages include multiple rel=canonical links to different URLs. This happens frequently in conjunction with SEO plugins that often insert a default rel=canonical link, possibly unbeknownst to the webmaster who installed the plugin. In cases of multiple declarations of rel=canonical, Google will likely ignore all the rel=canonical hints. Any benefit that a legitimate rel=canonical might have offered will be lost.

In both these types of cases, double-checking the page’s source code will help correct the issue. Be sure to check the entire <head> section as the rel=canonical links may be spread apart.


Mistake 4: Category or landing page specifies rel=canonical to a featured article

Let’s say you run a site about desserts. Your dessert site has useful category pages like “pastry” and “gelato.” Each day the category pages feature a unique article. For instance, your pastry landing page might feature “red velvet cupcakes.” Because the “pastry” category page has nearly all the same content as the “red velvet cupcake” page, you add a rel=canonical from the category page to the featured individual article.

If we were to accept this rel=canonical, then your pastry category page would not appear in search results. That’s because the rel=canonical signals that you would prefer search engines display the canonical URL in place of the duplicate. However, if you want users to be able to find both the category page and featured article, it’s best to only have a self-referential rel=canonical on the category page, or none at all.


Mistake 5: rel=canonical in the <body>

The rel=canonical link tag should only appear in the <head> of an HTML document. Additionally, to avoid HTML parsing issues, it’s good to include the rel=canonical as early as possible in the <head>. When we encounter a rel=canonical designation in the <body>, it’s disregarded.

This is an easy mistake to correct. Simply double-check that your rel=canonical links are always in the <head> of your page, and as early as possible if you can.


Conclusion

To create valuable rel=canonical designations:

• Verify that most of the main text content of a duplicate page also appears in the canonical page.
• Check that rel=canonical is only specified once (if at all) and in the <head> of the page.
• Check that rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content (i.e., not a 404, or worse, a soft 404).
• Avoid specifying rel=canonical from landing or category pages to featured articles as that will make the featured article the preferred URL in search results.

And, as always, please ask any questions in our Webmaster Help forum.

Written by Allan Scott, Software Engineer, Indexing Teamthis is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com

salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com