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Oodle Feed Frequently Asked Questions

Content

What is meant by a full set of listings?

Each feed sent to Oodle represents a set of listings: "classified ads in the Oak Town Free Press", or "cars listed on SellAnything.com". A feed with a full set of listings means that all currently active listings for the set are included. Any listing in the set that is not included in the feed is assumed to have expired, and is removed from our search index.

What characteristics should the page referred to by a listing url have?

The purpose of a listing url is to allow users to click and go directly from our search results to the actual page on your site that contains information on the listing in question. As such, the listing url should refer to a page that:

  • is specific to that listing
  • has useful information about that listing
  • does not require registration or the filling out of any forms in order to view listing information

In those occasional cases where an item becomes unavailable, but Oodle has not yet received a feed update reflecting this, the listing url for the item should take users to a page clearly indicating that the listing is no longer available.

What is image_url used for?

The picture provided via the image_url field of a listing is used to construct a thumbnail image which then appears next to the listing in our search results. This picture must be specifically related to the listing, and is generally expected to be an actual picture of the item being listed. Furthermore, if we are to display a thumbnail of it in our search results, your robots.txt must allow us to download the image. We encourage our feed partners to provide us with the largest image available.

Why is robots.txt relevant when I'm sending you a feed?

If the feed contains any image_url fields, then we need to download the images at these urls in order to generate thumbnails for the listing. This is only possible if your robots.txt file allows us access to the urls that these images are at. Please give access to "oodlebot" in your robots.txt.

# Example robots.txt entry where all images are in an /images/ subdirectory.
User-agent: oodlebot
Allow: /images/

What if an item listed is free?

If the price of an item is specifically 0, then a 0 value should be put in the price field, such as:

<price>0</price>

If the price is merely unknown (but not necessarily free), please see the next question.

What if the price of an item listed is unknown?

If a listing has a price associated with it, but its specific price is not known, then it is best to supply an empty price field, as with:

<price></price>

or to leave the price field out of this particular listing entirely.

It is much more common to have a listing with an unknown price than a listing whose price is 0 (free).


XML

What does it mean to say that XML is well-formed?

An XML document is said to be well-formed if it meets the requirements for well-formedness as defined by the W3C. Since this is a technical definition, it is possible to have a computer program check whether an XML document has this property.

The reason well-formedness is important is that it greatly eases automatic machine parsing of a document.

How can I check that my XML is well-formed?

There are a variety of publicly available XML validators and formedness checkers that you can obtain and pass your document to. A common one on many versions of Unix is xmlwf.

If you have perl, libxml, and XML::Simple on your system, you can run:

perl -e 'use XML::Simple(); $xml = XML::Simple::XMLin("./oodle_feed.xml")';

and if it runs with no errors, your document is well-formed.

As a last resort, an online XML formedness checker can be found here.

What are some things to watch out for in creating an XML feed?
  1. The characters & and < cannot appear as-is in document text.

    They must be escaped by &amp; and &lt; respectively, or the block of text the are a part of must be put into a literal text CDATA section. Examples:

    <description>
    This line with its unescaped & and < is **not** well-formed XML.
    </description>

    <description>
    This line with its escaped &amp; and &lt; *is* well-formed XML.
    </description>

    <description>
    <![CDATA[This line with CDATA-enclosed & and < is *also* well-formed XML.]]>
    </description>

  2. The encoding attribute should not be set to utf-8 when the document is actually ISO-8859-1 encoded.

    Many xml feeds we receive have, as their first line:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

    This is perfectly valid xml, but in many cases, the actual character encoding used for the feed is ISO-8859-1. So, when you are checking that your feed is well-formed, if you get a format error in the feed file, but you can't see any obvious error at that location, consider changing this top line to:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

Production

How often do you update my listings?

We update your listings at least daily, upon noticing that the feed file has been updated. We generally notice within 15 minutes of its update that a feed file has been changed, and download the new version for processing.

Why don't I see all of my listings in Oodle?

This could be happening for a variety of reasons. Among the most common are:

  • We do not have a valid location for the listing, and so cannot place it.
  • The listing was found to be a duplicate of a listing supplied by a different source, or even a duplicate of another listing in the same feed.

If these do not appear to be issues, please contact us at feed@oodle.com.

Will my listings appear in the Oodle network?

Yes. Your listings will appear both on Oodle and in Lycos and the other marketplaces that we inform.



If you have any other questions, please contact us at feed@oodle.com

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