Searchbot!

There's now a libsecondlife powered search engine from the Electric Sheep.

At least I read that it is libsecondlife bot powered.

It can be found at: http://search.sheeplabs.com/core/ .

What do y'all think about it?

Death to the asset servers!!! All hail everybody and their pet dog searching everything in SL!!!

I think it's a great example of why open source was a bad idea, and probably why the lag has been so bad for a while now.

I will not support such third party hacks. Having looked up our stuff, it's also clearly inaccurate.

Broccoli

I don't get it, maybe I'm a hopeless tekkiwikki but what's bad about this?

I searched me, and all I found were items I had deleted from 2 rental places last week and the week before. It says it is updated every 24 hours - but it does say it is beta sooooo.....

Also there was a place to click on to see 'more 'of my items - but when clicked it just wiped out the ones that were there.

*shrug*

Can a searchbot from outside create lag inside ?

It has had to be in SL to gather the information, I understand by flying over regions and basically grabbing details of everything it could (in a copybot style), so if you think what a load it is on the asset server when you log in to your own land, multiply this by maybe 20x to grab a whole region, then multiply by the 7,800 or so regions there are.... all this *on top* of regular load, every 24 hours, I would guess that there certainly was some lag created.

Broccoli

Yep. They seem to say that they're scanning every object in the world, every 24 hours.

I wonder what, if any, kind of caching system LL uses for assets and if this throws off code that makes frequently used objects faster...

I have searched for some of my stuff, and I know I have allot more than the whole 6 items it's showing for me, and it's inaccurate. This is revealing the items I have as being placed on one of my neighbors parcels of land (not owned by me) instead of my own (by it's parcel name, etc). It's also showing prices for the items listed, which I don't quite understand where it's picking that up from as they are not for sale, and merely my dining table and chair set located within my home..... Yes, very beta it appears, heh.

Shouldn't people be concerned about privacy breach here?

there is an opt out option so its not really invading privacy I dont think. Also uh the results I got were about 7 days old and only 6 items showed up that no longer exist as that build has moved so I"m not sure how relevant the info is. So according to that bot I dont have much of anything. I dont know how its supposed to work exactly whether its real time stuff of what, but at present this bot itsnt doing a whole lot of accurate botting

Anyhow if you dont want to be a part of it there is information on the FAQ page to opt out etc so that is pretty much covered except it should probably be a totally opt in system to start with since it doesn't just search for classified stuff.

Presently though its not functioning very well.. so we have nothing to fear hehe

I have a feeling this 'Grid Shepherd' guy is about to become very unpopular and unwanted...

Actually, I think this is great, and it's going to influence how people showcase their products. Please read their FAQ before getting too worried about it.

I'm not sure what's so great about it. Considering it only shows objects set for sale, and the larger portion of commerce is done via vendors, the selection of items shown is going to relatively small. I also see that a lot of the items aren't actually for sale, but rather items that people own but are set to sale unwittingly. Easy to tell because the owner and creator are not the same.

SL is laggy enough as it is without a bot coming in scanning every object in a sim every 24 hours. I'll be banning him from both my sims as soon as I get home.

It's great for shoppers SuezanneC. I just found an item I was about to buy being sold for L$100 less by the same seller in another sim. I don't have any privacy concerns in SL so I don't care if somebody finds that freebie penis I lost on my second day here -- although I'd appreciate an IM with the coordinates all the same.

Hmmm I just did a search for myself there. It found about half of the objects I have available for sale, however it incorrectly identified the locations of all but 6 of them. I wonder if it is pegging the location at wherever it happens to be standing / floating when it scans, instead of the locations of the actual items. If people were to follow the secondlife:// links, many would end up underwater or in residential properties, rather than the mall where my products are at.

In a completely unrelated and probably irrelavent note, I had a customer inform me today that many of my for-sale objects were not 'for sale'. I had to go and check every one of them, and found that on about 1/3 of them, the default left-click behavior had changed from 'buy object' to 'touch/grab'. (How the heck can objects change parameters on their own?) FWIW, I do not use scripted vendors, all of my products are either 'buy contents' or 'buy copy'.

So.. I'm not sure yet. Should 'Grid Shephard' be estate-banned? Their FAQ claims it is less laggy than a regular client, but regardless of that... I just plain don't like bots. Maybe that makes me prejudiced.

-Atashi

They are certainly not searching every object in-world. On the mainland, perhaps.

I noticed this last night when I could not find a single of my items for sale (which are almost exclusively on islands, with only two vendors on mainland), but my wife - who has several mainland locations - was able to find probably 50% of her stuff.

Overall, I think this is an insanely good use of open source code for extending Second Life, and am only sorry that they beat me to it.

My understanding (guesstimate) based on creating my own bots: This does not create lag by hammering the asset server or repeatedly hitting Search like a landbot might... It essentially just uses the same ObjectUpdate and similar packets that every avatar in Second Life gets in order to "see" it's surroundings, but by virtue of being a bot is able to determine which of those objects it "sees" are for sale and can catalog such information. It's no more laggy than an avatar flying around the grid.

Way to go, Electric Sheep Company, cool stuff indeed!

Yes, those people selling stuff definitely don't want it known Okay, just a little friendly sarcasm

hehe all of my stuff is in prim vendors not any kind of scripted vendor and doesn't show up kinda makes it not very good in its present form even for the supposed marketing use it has. I also seem to only be able to bring up like 10 items or something which is a tiny selection if you type in a word like "jeans" or "houses"

I think at best the current stage of the service is 'proof of concept'. Yes, definitely, i've noticed that parcel names for locations do not match up with the actual coordinates displayed. However, the slurls returned on the objects that do come up are accurate.

I think this is a great idea - the existing search tools in world are horrible and it gets very difficult to find obscure items when ultimately the in world system depends solely on user descriptors (which are often abused).

To be fair, there is some concern in external blogs about privacy - in essence, some individuals are upset that things they might have forgotten to mark off as not for sale might show up, and that such items might be stolen from private property.

This is a mentality I disagree with - tools are merely tools - they can be used for good or bad. If anything, this tool can be used by an individual to check whether he or she has indeed forgotten to switch any of their objects to no sale. It promotes conscientiousness about one's own property and encourages better connectivity overall.

Sentimental value, eh?

If someone found it and was able to make use of it I'm sure it's worn down to a tiny nub by now.

There's some word on this search system from the sheep folk at http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/christian/?p=149 .

When will we get this idea extended to events?

Can someone figure out how to make an effective price shopping system for private estate parcel rentals and sales? Having to teleport to every single place to read the covenant and read the notecard in the rental box or whatever sucks.

Hey, how about at least a private parcel for sale or rent search that has a button to click to read the covenant? The sale or rental price might be hard to get since they are often in read dollars paid through Paypal or some other extra-LL payment system but just being able to read the covenant without teleporting would be a big improvement.

These sort of search systems ease the burden on LL's systems too, fewer teleports in search of things to buy or covenants to read, and the non-LL sites can read data once from LL and transmit it thousands of times to other users.

A centralized database of all the already inworld textures that are freely distributable or for sale, with the abilty to view the images, and tag them, so you could do a search for, say, "brazillian birch bark" and find one that already exists - think how many fewer textures we'd need if nobody felt the need to upload another copy of the same old textures from Google images again.

But I digress.

the sheep have another blog post on the search tool:

http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/giff/?p=337

How do u judge the bot will apparently effect the slgrid's performance? IMO, compares to sl user's activities, the bot have little effect on slgrid, Searchbot is a good feature, i support it, currently it's BETA time, I hope it's out soon!

Really? Have you tried searching for something that you know is on a private island or are you just saying that?

I don't know for certain, but yes I have tried searching for stuff that is *only* sold on private islands, and it does not show up.

That could mean any of a number of things, and I just suggested the one that seemed most likely to me. It's possible that the Electric Sheep Company will provide a real answer whereas I am trying to make an intelligent guess.


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I can say for certain that it has found things that are on a private island.

The parcel involved was off limits to No Payment Info (Grid Shepherd is a No Payment Info AV). The search result showed the item as belonging to a neighboring parcel.

I do think it should be opt-in.