So here is the picture:
Sotre Listings (Languages support in package)
Why there are two Hungarian? I need to fill in everything twice! (like description, pictures etc...)
What i need to do? Or its normal?
Actually the second one Hungarian (Hungary) is targeting on Hungarian market while the first one single Hungarian is for other country/region where people also speak Hungarian, like Romania. There are around 14 million people speaking Hungarian language. About 10 million of them live in Hungary and the rest 4 million spread over Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia etc.
The counterpart, you might see in Store listing languages, is about Italian, Italian(Italy) and Italian(Switzerland). The second one targets on Italian market and the third one for Swiss market while the first Italian targets on the rest country/region where people mainly speak Italian.
Now you could complete the Store listing page by selecting language you want to support. More details, please refer to Store listing languages.
Related
Lets say I want to have some English text spoken in an Italian accent.
Many of the engine demos I have tried on their respected sites will have the Italian language available, but when you try to get it to pronounce a few sentences in English, they often become highly unintelligible because they are operating by a different phoneme.
There are phoneme tags in SSML, and I know one site that allows you to actually demo with SSML. I try putting in this common and generic Italian conversation into their Italian voice:
Mama mia! Princess Peach and my friends have been kidnapped?
Chase Bowser, so we can eat some spaghetti!
And it is fairly unintelligible. Utilizing SSML or something else; Can I keep the accent, but correct the speech phoneme enough to make it intelligible?
You can hire a voice-talent with Italian accent and make a new TTS model where such option is available. Even with a several hours of speech you can get a decent model.
The second option is speech morphing, but it requires some efforts as well as knowledge in the domain.
Can anyone offer any color on how the keywords work on ITC's app store? In the bad old days, you needed to be careful to separately list things, so that:
Toronto real estate,Vancouver real estate
was bad, whereas:
Toronto,Vancouver,real estate
was better. Any hints or tips would be greatly appreciated!
The way keywords are managed by Apple changes from time to time.
I would suggest going into specialized websites. A rather simplistic rule is: sentences in the title counts towards searches: if a user searches for "great party", then an app that has the exact "great party" in the title will appear before an app that doesn't have that exact sentence (e.g. "Creating a great party" would appear before "Great aunt party"). This also applies to keywords (e.g. "Creating a great party" would appear first with the same search compared to an app having "great,party" in the keywords).
In-app texts counted: no more. Keywords count separately so "Vancouver City" as keyword would have the same effect as "Vancouver,city" but in the last case you have "three" keywords instead of one (Vancouver, Vancouver city and City -well, and City Vancouver, but that is less probably looked for).
The more keywords you can place in the title, the better (you'll have more space in the keywords section) but Apple may reject your app for that reason (I have experience with that). However, this depends on the reviewer and the risks you are able to take, in terms of time. You may see an example of an app title with plenty of keywords in the title here (notice they didn't use that bunch of keywords inside the title in the English title).
Finally, this is a link that gets updated and also links to the most well-known App Store Optimization websites: apptamin.
Everyone. Recently Google Translate Is Integrated Into My Project, Which Plays The Role Of Translating Some Product Names, Product Descriptions, Product Related Category Names. But Cause There Are Plenty Of Products In My Database(And Increased Quickly), Google Translate Api Would Cost Considerable Money.
I Want To Translate By Google As Less As Possible. In The Translation, Many Words Are Same Among Many Products, For Example : 阿迪达斯 - Adidas, 苹果 - iphone, 篮球 - Basketball, Bla Bla..... I Wanna Do Some Tricks, But Find No Idea.
Did Anyone Encounter Such Questions?
Any Help Would Be Appreciated.
It sounds like what you need is actually the ability to reuse translation at the string or substring level (in other words, per database entry). You can't really do that with Google, that I know of. You've got a few options, as I see it:
You could switch over to Microsoft Translator and use their methods
that allow you to place translations yourself, such as their
Collaborative Translation feature that lets you override the MT with
a preferred translation and even to vote translations up/down. Quality here will be broadly comparable to Google (I often find it better), and you have methods at your disposal that allow this override. Also, unlike Google, the Microsoft API is free up to a certain volume. Take a look:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/translator/developers.aspx
Microsoft also has a unique feature called the Microsoft Translator Hub, which can use your terminology, for example, for translations. However,depending on how you implemented any solution with Microsoft, you might still have the problem that you are making more calls out to Microsoft than you'd like, and, moreover, that "matching" only takes place at the level of a whole record or string, so it would not hit the case of shared linguistic elements being concatenated into one string.
There's a commercial offering called GeoFluent (full disclosure--I am the product manager for this product, so I'm clearly biased :)) that works with Microsoft Translator but provides pre and post translation processing that can deal with sub-segment and may reduce the volume you are therefore putting through translation each time. It could make sense if, as you mention, you are rapidly adding to your database. Of course, this is a commercial offering too, so you'd have to balance the costs.
Let me know if this helps, and happy to answer any other questions you have.
Marcus
There is a PHP sample here : http://weblite.ca/svn/dataface/modules/tm/trunk/lib/googleTranslatePlugin.php
That allows you to send and array and return an array.
array(source=>target) getTranslations()
translates all of the user provided strings into the target language using the Google Translate API and returns an array of source=>target
strings.
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Greetings,
I've been toying with an idea for a new project and was wondering if anyone has any idea on how a service like Kayak.com is able to aggregate data from so many sources so quickly and accurately. More specifically, do you think Kayak.com is interacting with APIs or are they crawling/scraping airline and hotel websites in order to fulfill user requests? I know there isn't one right answer for this sort of thing but I'm curious to know what others think would be a good way to go about this. If it helps, pretend you are going to create kayak.com tomorrow ... where is your data coming from?
I'm working in travel industry as a software architect / project lead on the precisely kind of project you describe - in our region we work with suppliers directly, but for outgoing we connect to several aggregators.
To answer your question... some data you have, some you get in various ways, and some you have to torture and twist until it confesses.
What's your angle?
The questions you have to ask are... Do you want to sell advertising like Kayak or do you take a cut like Expedia? Are you into search or into selling travel services? Do you target niche (for example, just air travel) or everything (accommodation, airlines, rent-a-car, additional services like transport/sightseeing/conferences etc)? Do you target region (US or part of US) or the world? How deep do you go - do you just show several sites on a single screen, or do you bundle different services together and package them dynamically?
Getting the data
If you're going with Kayak business model, you technically don't need site's permission... but a lot of sites have affiliate programs with IFrames or other simple ways to direct the customer to their site. On the plus side, you don't have to deal with payments/complaints and travelers themselves. As for the cons... if you want to compare prices yourself and present the cheapest option to the user, you'll have to integrate on a deeper level, and that means APIs and web scraping.
As for web scraping... avoid it. It sucks. Really. Just don't do it. Trust me on this one. For example, some things like lowcosters you can't get without web scraping. Low cost airlines live from value added services. If the user doesn't see their website, they don't sell extra stuff, and they don't earn anything. Therefore, they don't have affiliates, they don't offer APIs, and they change their site layout almost constantly. However, there are companies which earn a living by web scraping lowcoster's sites and wrapping them into nice APIs. If you can afford them, you can give your users cost-comparison of low cost flights and that's huge.
On the other hand, there are "normal" carriers which offer APIs. It's not that big of a problem to get to airlines since they're all united under IATA; basically, you buy from IATA, and IATA distributes the money to carriers. However, you probably don't want to connect directly to carrier network. They have web services and SOAP these days, but believe me when I say that there are SOAP protocols which are just an insanely thin wrappers around a text prompt through which you can interact with a mainframe with an 80es-style protocol (think of a Unix prompt where you're billed per command; and it takes about 20 commands to do one search). That's why you probably want to connect to somebody a bit more down the food chain, with a better API.
Airlines are thus on both extremes of Gaussian curve; on one side are individual suppliers, and on the other highly centralized systems where you implement one API and you're able to fly anywhere in the world. Accommodation and the rest of travel products are in between. There are several big players which aggregate hotels, and a ton of small suppliers with a lot of aggregators which cover only part of a spectrum. For example, you can rent a lighthouse and it's even not that expensive - but you won't be able to compare the prices of different lighthouses in one place.
If you're into Kayak business model, you'll probably end up scraping websites. If you're into integrating different providers, you'll often work with APIs, some of which are pretty good, and most of which are tolerable. I haven't worked with RSS but there's not a lot of difference between RSS and web scraping. There is also a fourth option not mentioned in Jeff's answer... the one where you get your data nightly, for example .CSV files through FTP and similar.
Life sucks (mini-rant)
And then there's complexity. The more value you want to add, the more complexity you'll have to handle. Can you search accommodations which allow pets? For a hostel which is located less than 5 km from the town center? Are you combining flights, and are you able to guarantee that the traveler will have enough time to get from one airport to another... can you sell the transport in advance? A famous cellist doesn't want to part from his precious 18th century cello; can you sell him another seat for the cello (yep, not making this one up)?
Want to compare prices? Sure, the room is EUR 30 per night. But you can either get one double for 30 and one single for 20, or you can get one extra bed in a double and get 70% off for third person. But only if it's a child under 12 years of age; our extra beds are not for adults. And you don't get the price for extra bed in search results - only when you calculate the final price.
And don't even get me started on dynamic packaging. Want to sell accommodation + rent-a-car? No problem; integrate with two different providers, and off you go... manually updating list of locations in the city (from rent-a-car provider) to match with hotels (from accommodation provider, who gives you only the city for each hotel). Of course, provided that you've already matched the list of cities from the two, since there is no international standard for city codes.
Unlike a lot of other industries which have many products, travel industry has many very complex products. Amazon has it easy; selling books and selling potatoes, it's the same thing; you can even ship them in the same box. They combine easily and aren't assembled from many parts. :)
P.S. Linking to an interesting recent thread on Hacker News with some insider info regarding flights.
P.P.S. Recently stumbled on a great albeit rather old blogpost on IATA's NDC protocol with overview of how travel industry is connected and a history lesson how this came to be.
They use a software package like ITA Software, which is one of the companies Google is in the process of picking up.
Only 3 ways I know of to get data from websites.
RSS Feeds - We use rss feeds a lot at my company to integrate existing site's data with our apps. It's fast and most sites already have an RSS feed available. The problem with this is not all sites implement the RSS standard properly so if you're pulling data from many RSS feeds across many sites then make sure you write your code so that you can add exceptions and filters easily.
APIs - These are nice if they are designed well and have all the information you need, however that's not always the case, plus if the sites are not using a standard api format then you'll have to support multiple API's.
Web Scraping - This method would be the most unreliable as well as the most expensive to maintain. But if you're left with nothing else it can be done.
This article says that Kayak was asked to stop scrapping a certain airlines page. That leads me to believe that they probably do scraping on sites that they don't have a relationship with (and a data feed that comes with that relationship).
Travelport offer a product called "Universal API" which connects to flights and hotels and car rental companies and copes with package deals and all the various complexities to do with taxes and exchange rates:
https://developer.travelport.com/app/developer-network/resource-centre-uapi
I've just started using it and it seems fine so far. The queries are a little slow, but then so is every query on every OTA (Online travel agent)'s site.
There's two good APIs I've found from flight comparison websites recently
There's one from Wego, and one from Skyscanner. Both seem to have a good range and breadth of data from a number of airlines and good documentation too.
Wego pays each time a user clicks from your app to a booking website and Skyscanner pay affiliates 50% of 'revenue' (I assume that means the commission they make from airlines)
This is an old post but I thought I'd just add. I'm a data architect who works for a company that feeds these travel sites with content. This company enters into contracts with many hotel brands, individual hotels and other content providers. We aggregate this information then pass it onto the different channels. They then aggregate again in to their system.
The Large GDS systems are also content providers.
Aggregation is done by many methods... matching algorithms(in-house) and keys. Being an aggregation service, we need to communicate on the client level.
Hope this helps! cheers!
If you're selling widgets, we all know that having "Bob's Widgets" in the title and the H1 gives you a better ranking in Google when people search for "widgets".
But what if, as someone explained to me the other day, their product is known by different names in different parts of the world?
In the US, it's called a Widget. In Canada, it's called a Flidget. In Australia, it's called a Zidget. There's really no official name for it, just informal names.
Meta-tags are no problem, but apart from that, what's the best way to cope with that situation? Just make separate pages? You can't have 3 H1s on the page. One H1 which says "Widgets, (aka Flidgets, Zidgets)"?
Or do I just trust that Google is smart enough and some magical taxonomy database groups those three words together as the same thing?
EDIT: This question got downvoted simply because it's about SEO? How bizarre. If you even bother to read the question, you can see I'm not trying to game the system or get away with anything. I have a genuinely interesting question and a valid client need.
Please note also, that I always use semantic HTML, I am well aware of how search engine rankings work, and I'm not trying to get away with anything shady.
If my client was selling beer, I would simply use semantic HTML to put the word "beer" first and foremost. If I was selling beer to French people, I would make another page in French and do the same with "biere". But imagine for a second that beer isn't called "beer" in other English-speaking nations. Imagine it's called "reeb". How do I correctly, semantically code an English-language page when different English-language users will be searching using a different string, but searching for the same thing.
HTML meta-tags were originally created for the purpose of embedding exactly such metadata into a webpage. But because of the SEO industry and the commercialization of the web, meta-tags like 'keywords' are no longer used by major search engines.
With all of the advances in page ranking algorithms and intelligent search robots over the years, there's really not much to do in terms of active 'search engine optimization' for legitimate websites. In today's search environment, all you have to do is optimize your site for your visitors, and it will automatically be optimize for searching.
So you can passively optimize your site's ranking by doing any(or all) of the following:
Use good spelling and writing etiquette (like not writing your entire site in caps or text-message-speak)
Format your pages using proper markup. (Title your document, mark your headings with H1/H2/etc., delimit your paragraphs, and so on and so forth.)
Abide by established web standards and write well-formed code.
Weed out broken links and make sure your site works properly.
Don't use pop-ups, cover your site with banner ads, or otherwise bombard visitors with advertising
Don't link to disreputable websites
Simply put, make your site as user-friendly and as accessible as possible. If your site is useful to visitors and provides valuable content, most major search engines like Google or Yahoo! are smart enough to rank it fairly. Your ranking may be modest at first. But if you're genuinely supplying quality content then, as your site becomes better established on the web, other sites will start linking to you, increasing your search ranking.
And if other webpages linking to your site use the various names & nicknames your product is referred to by, then your site will also be associated with those names/keywords (that's how Google Bombing works). Google also tracks synonymous search terms and is even smart enough to recommend related/alternative search terms in some cases.
On the other hand, if you're creating a spam site or the 10 millionth affiliate marketing website with the same exact products and content as the other 9,999,999 sites of the same exact nature, then expect your search engine ranking to be reasonably poor.
It's generally only websites with no original content and that provide no legitimate value to visitors that require active (black hat) SEO techniques to gain a decent ranking--polluting search results in the process. Otherwise, if you're actually building a useful website, then just optimize it for your visitors and let Google/Yahoo! do their job.
The anchor text of your inbound links is a lot more important than the tags you use. So try getting links to your page with both "beer" and "reeb". As long as you'll get enough links with both terms, you'll do well in SERPs, no matter the keywords you use in it.
One option is to localize pages for the different target regions you are interested.
If you use a local domain, google will give it priority on default searches on that country. When I hit www.google.com, it redirects me to www.google.com.mx, and any search I do tends to display high results from mexico domains. I actually have to hit a couple options, when I don't want that behavior.
I also think google has an option to map parts of the site to a region, so you can keep the single domain.
Update: Regarding the beer example, you can localize per country (which is what I mention above). Actually its not that of a special need, since english british and english US have their differences.
The talk has been language agnostic, but consider how .net handle resources. Lets say the current request is being processed for en-GB, and you look for a resource (i.e. a text, image, etc). It will first try to find the resource for the specific culture: en-GB, if it isn't found it will look under the more general en (and then in the default resource file).
The previous allows you to selectively localize what you really need on the more specific resource files. If you only need to localize the resources with the key beerName, you can just configure that on the specific languages and leave the rest.