what find features would help sl businesses?

my list so far:
- making the search feature work better
- make the land description text box bigger
- "and" "or" "not" and "like" searches
- more sorting than name and traffic

what else?

(and maybe this will vitiate the need for ugly bill boards)

Since Find acts almost exactly like a search engine, I think an additional field for keywords - in addition to the standard description box - would be very helpful.

When you create a website, you can have a description section and a keywords section. Description is your 1 or 2 sentence blurb about your shop/service/whatever. Keywords is where you list the words you want people to find you under when they search: shoes,clothes,mens,womens,home,furnishing,furniture, etc etc etc.

That would allow you to use your marketing savvy to write a classy description of your store, without having to worry about shoehorning in all the applicable search terms you want to be found under.

-- bigger size box on land description a must
-- a return of more than 20 items on the MOST POPULAR PLACES list so that at least 100 if not the entire list could be there available for scrolling
-- categories in the FIND list which the Lindens have yet to create such as Arts or Non-Profit or Entertainment, as in the EVENTS list.
--more sub-categories like VEHICLES or SKINS or ANIMATIONS so that creators can tag their lot with one of these categories that will ease their location

Definitely something that could enable you to enlist the exact products you have without looking like you're typing in random keywords in your store description (which, by the way, is FAR TOO SMALL).

I submitted PROP-290 in the voting section which simply requests more space in the property descriptions and bio page. Its a start.

i think getting rid of sub-categories all together would be better...

instead create a keyword field that is searchable, but not part of the description. that way people could create their own "sub-categories" like coffee table, bathroom, water feature, bdsm, furry, slave, penis, bling, jewelry, pets...

i wonder if this is still a useful feature at all.

a second box for key words. so you can have a descriptive description and get search keywords in too.




jester


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after talking to some lindens. this seems like it's in the works, but is a long term solution.

keep the ideas coming folks.

I'd just like to emphasize here that we need a TextArea to type in the text, not a TextField as we have now. It'd be nice to be able to type more text, but we also need several lines of text editor in which to type it.

Of course it is. Many people look to it. It's good to have a handy reference to the ladder you have to climb to get the developer's awards.

there are ideas about what find can/will/should do.

but there's a flipside to that, what do you think find do?

my shortlist so far:
- list all the items in a business
- say how good or bad the business is
- give customer testimonials
- list other similar businesses

How about the business owners helping themselves by not having hard to find entrances and buildings so ugly you screech out in horror?

Getting feedback from residents buying from SL businesses would be a major feature that I'd like to endorse. No matter how much this is "gamed" in platforms like eBay, the truth is, it's better to have some feedback (even if warped) than none at all.

I don't have a definite idea on how things should be "rated"/"commented" and shown in SL's Find features. But it would be interesting to have items/merchants sorted by "number of comments" or something. If people are talking about an item/merchant - even when they're being harsh on it! - this is more important than not talking about it at all. So an ordered search by "number of comments" would be very useful, IMHO.

Of course, all of this is wishful thinking - it simply takes too much time to implement and figure out all the possible ways this could be "gamed". One idea is that every resident could have up to ten "comments" to give out (similar to the feature vote listing). If you really, really wanted to comment an eleventh item, you'd need to disable one of the other ten, at your choice. This would make people limit their scope of "gaming" the comments.

(BTW, I also hope that a similar system is employed for the avatar ratings in the future )

The 90s are calling, they want their search engine back..

Why dont you start fighting the "ugly" RL billboards?
How can you legimately ban something from SL that is ubiquitous in RL?

i'm not trying to ban billboards. i'm hoping they won't be needed much.

and i still think if people are putting up billboards, that it makes sense for them to be vendors.