More search options for places

This is just a thought I had while trying to think of a cool place to explore. I've done all futuristic places that I can find, but I'm sure there are loads of awesome places still to visit, but I don't know what to search under to find them.

So I'm thinking of some new options:

Popular places by category
This is simple, under popular places simply list the categories like under search >> places, this allows you to view the most visited places for each category, e.g shopping, or art and culture.

Random places!
Simply returns a small (10?) selection of random places which can be refreshed to get some more, and maybe refined by category as well.


I guess basically part of the problem is that currently you need to know what you're looking for, which meant that "Find" was an appropriate name, but it's now search, yet we need to know what we want
I know WHAT I want (a place to explore) but no way of finding it easily, so random choices would be nice.

Optional
A more advanced feature would be the ability to add 'tags' to a plot, so you can tag a place as "Explore" to show that it's a good place for exploring, and it will come up as such in search. If someone enters a word that matches a place's tag and then goes there, that tag gets a 'hit'. Hits can be removed by in the search window by clicking "Not what I was looking for" for any place that is an inappropriate listing. e.g if a place is tagged as 'explore' but is actually a big mall tagging as many words as possible. If a tag gets negative hits after say a week after its addition, then it will be removed for that plot. Or maybe a tag that has more than X% of click-throughs mark it as not what they wanted, since not everyone would use the feature.
Plots would maybe still have a limit to how many tags they can have, though it should be quite generous.
This removes the need to search a plot's description, just find plots with appropriate tags and list the ones found.

Good idea
One question: should it have an 'all categories' entry? Given that traffic is slightly gamed as is... and removal of the 'top traffic places in SL for all categories' might help to reduce traffic gaming, at least a little...

I agree with this too. One thing I'd suggest though : make sure it's easy to refresh the list if you want to page through random places really fast.


I like the idea that people should be encouraged to ask themselves "what am I looking for?" and think before they hit Search. I agree though, 'exploration'-type locations are hard to find atm, thus 'random' would be a good idea.



This is really interesting. A sort of 'voting' with regard to a place's usefulness.
How useful would it be?
How annoying (nagging you to vote) would it have to be before you voted? Would it annoy residents too much to be useful? If residents had a choice about voting and weren't nagged to, then would it not ultimately turn into a traffic-like number whereby people vote for a place if they like it (just as they would spend time there with traffic) and ignore it if they don't?
Would people use it, at first? What about in the long term? Would it need to be complex and thus violate KISS?
Lastly.... would people game it? If so how, and how badly would this undermine the system?

It's actually not intended as a voting system, think of it more like a self-moderating search feature. Instead of having people cram as many search words as they can into descriptions they add 'tags' to their plot of land, each plot can have so many tags as required (maybe bigger plots could have more tags like with prims so large areas managed as a single parcel aren't penalised? Not sure).
These tags are then used for searches, and each tag a plot has set would have two numbers, the number of 'hits' (or click-throughs, how many people actually went to this plot after searching for this word or phrase), and the number of people who clicked the "Not what I wanted" button after visiting the plot.

As I see it, the "Not what I wanted" button would be done as one of two ways, either it appears in the search pane after you teleport to a location, this is unobtrusive and if you decide to go somewhere else, it'll be there when you re-open search. I wouldn't make it a forceful thing (ie not a pop-up). Another alternative is a tiny box that appears under the plot's name in the menu and is a button, click it and you're asked to confirm that it wasn't what you wanted, but I'm not sure I like it like that.

The idea then is that if the number of "Not what I wanted" presses compared with hits exceeds some limit then that tag is removed from that plot, or maybe even blocked from use for the plot.

As an example we'll use the age-old trick that people tried on Google to get their sites listed by using keywords. Say I have a plot of land that sells avatars and scripts. The tags I would pick would be avatar and script. However, I want to get hits, so I enter my tags as:

Avatars
Scripts
Sex

Notice the little sneaky one I added to get traffic?
Now, say lots of people search for 'sex', and 10 of them get my plot in their list and visit it. They find that my plot isn't what they were after at all! All of them in an outrage open the window to try another place, many of them will skip over, but say 4 of them are aware of/noticed the "Not what I was looking for" button (maybe it could be highlighted somehow) and click it. I now have 10 hits, with 4 points against me, if the threshold of points against vs hits is 30% then the tag 'sex' will be removed from plot of land, I wouldn't be able to put it back (or not for some period of time at least, or maybe even would have to pay L$ to re-enable it).

We'd probably say you need at least 10 or so hits from different avatars before "Not what I wanted" presses are counted, someone could still use their alts to malciiously remove your tags if they really wanted, but they'd have to know them first and get in quick before visitors who find your plot genuine count in your favour.
Also, a hit is only counted once every so often, say 24 hours, this is to stop someone just constantly searching and teleporting to inflate the positive count.

I currently have a proposal in Feature Voting that is similar to this, and is along the same lines as your suggestion here. Proposal #1903. Check it out.