Please let me know if this has been requested before, the little searching that I've done so far has come up with nada. Planning to code this into a formal proposal request, but it sounds like the thread needs to come first...
I would like to see some kind of yellow-page system put in place to be able to locate similar objects (object == one of the tabs on the "find" window) by their general subjects, so that similar stores / events / services are grouped together. I see that LL has placed general categories on a lot of its postings which go at least part of the way in this direction, it would be nice if these categories were more specific (hierarchial?) and browsable by their category (similar to how inventory is stored?)
Such a yellow page listing probably would not be good done by a 3rd party, the number of items that would need to be listed would be very large to manually maintain, I'm not sure that someone wouldn't need to ask permission before listing their product / event / whatever in their guide, and the ui limits what can be done in terms of presenting large amounts of information to the user by an object.
I am a recent newbie (been online the last 2-3 weeks now) and when I first entered the main grid I had an extremely difficult time finding anything to do / buy / whatever. Yes, there are a number of notes both on help island and on the main grid that gave me some links to start out with and while that list was incredibly useful, it was also very limited and narrow in terms of what I was looking for. At least on one occasion I found a link in a help file that I was extremely interested in, only to find that it had been boarded up and closed for the last year or so.
I recognize that the best way to find something in SL is: (1) search through the Find utility, trying searches with multiple keywords and try to figure out which results are relevant (the "google" approach), (2) page through the classifieds, seeing what might be interesting (slants strongly towards the more successful shopping areas and land barons), (3) search through the groups to find threads that might be discussing places that you are looking for (was told to do this by a couple people, haven't done it yet), (4) open up and read random forum posts, see if anyone mentions what you are looking for in passing (the most time consuming, and actually the one that seems to work the best for me right now)