New Search/All Rankings Don't Make Sense

Using all the prims you own is wrong?

Some things you can be sure of:
-- Parcel "traffic" is (almost?) irrelevant to the results ranking anymore. Residents and LL has wanted to kill off "traffic" for a long time. Anyone wasting money on campers after this becomes the main client will find themselves hurting for visitors other than campers. Maybe even have trouble with campers being unable to locate them

-- Honest mention of your place/thing/person in other places is highly relevant. That means the more people who have landmarks or Picks to your place (and USE them), are Members in your group, and mention you in About sections is a Good Thing.

-- Over time, as people search for keywords and click through to the most relevant results (ignoring bad ones), those good results will rank higher later - and be harder to unseat from their top ranking.

-- Paid advertising (classifieds) is going to become more important if you can't make the above work.

I for one welcome our Google overlords. Really.

And not because I'm the top hit for "sammy" either.

I'd like to thank everyone on this thread for their suggestions. You all have come up with a number of good ideas I can implement to make NCI classes' positions in the new Search/All system better reflect their size, scope, and impact on the community.

I appreciate the help.

I you do Help / About Second Life, what version number does it show?

According to everything the Lindens are saying on the blog, traffic is still extremely relevant in the search results. Sure they are adding other things to it, but they aren't getting rid of it by any stretch of the imagination. Also, the traffic on your parcel will now apparently boost your classified relevance and object searches also. This could effectively make campers - both the paid and owner-operated versions - more valuable.


Dishonest mentions will be equally relevant. There's nothing to keep owners from creating 1000 alts that flood their Picks and descriptions with keywords and links. And of course, all the alts would be in the group as well to boost the groups relevance and the relevance of the group owned land.


You can't find the good results until you click through several bad ones. This increases the relevance of the bad ones and makes it harder for the good ones to overcome. Not having the pictures immediately visable will also hurt the good places.


Based on a lot of comments I'm seeing on the blog, paid advertising just became less important. You'll probably be able to hit the same relevance numbers with an army of alts and and a ton of bogus prims for sale. Keep the money in your pocket.

It's 1.18.5 (0).

coco

I just downloaded it to see because everyone got me worried. I see not much difference in the listings other then now groups are gone and so are all the avatars that had names that had a word that was used in search.

My stuff placed about the same and there was somewhat less "spam" shall we say which didn't make it necessary to bump your land listing above all the groups and avatar names in the "all" section which is what a lot of newbies hit by default

So, if landmarks affect search results, then I guess we will see the rise of

LANDMARK BOT!

I am so sick of being landmark spammed everytime I go shopping. It is so annoying that sometimes I turn around and leave. Will we see an increase in this tactic now from shopkeepers who hope that people will accept and keep their landmarks? And will people start auto-spamming me with invites to their groups now too?

I think I'll pick the army of alts option for my own store. At least that way I'm not annoying people.

Xi, what I meant by LandmarkBot was using alts solely to have landmarks - actually, you'd create an account, put landmarks in it to the place you want boost in the search results, add the proper text in the about statement, have it join the right groups , and give it the proper set of picks - all the stuff about an avatar that affects the search. T

So it wouldn't really be a LandmarkBot but rather a SearchGamingBot.

he search system may be slick enough not to fall for my simplistic ideas but you can rest assured whatever Search will fall for, somebody is busy already figuring out what it is.

It's also possible that there are so many accounts in SL that trying to game the system with fake accounts wouldn't work well because it would take thousands of fake accounts for it to make much difference.

There might be a tendency for places to want to give out landmarks even more so than before, though, like you say.

Well I may be a bit biased since when you search for rave I'm the first one that pops up...so long as you have mature checked! Yay...so far so good.

My impression is that the New Search will probably be appreciated by AV’s that are not involved in content creation or business. I think the majority of the business community will be very skeptical of this new product.

As it stands it favours Walmart type businesses over the smaller shops that possess limited land , limited prims, limited resources amd limited amount of money to burn. This outcome was predicted by a Prokofy Neva (his website) interview around a month ago and from playing around with this NEW SEARCH for several hours i am of a similar opinion.

I own several types of businesses on SL and have spent months developing ways of featuring reasonably high in most searches (ALL, Classifieds, Places) i.e top half of Page 1. At a stroke most of that work has been negated with this NEW SEARCH!!
Some of the returned SEARCH results are completely bizarre with businesses that are considered small with not many BUY prims, one or none classified adverts, no other vendor locations or no further cross links… figuring right at the top of the Search!!! How does that work whilst my 1st listing is buried deep into page 2 or 3?

Amongst other things, i own a Fetish/Goth Mall which has been in SL for 2 years now (took it over 3 months ago). I don’t use campers to falsify traffic or camping bots in the sky…i use traditional methods of marketing which includes SL Classifieds, advertising in external SL newspapers, radio advertisements, customer group and periodically hosting game shows within the mall.
My only saving grace is that the mall is specialised for Fetish/Goth/Vamp/Punk fashion (plus a few big named conventional ones) and that the vendors here are all of very high quality (No BIAB’s or Resellers), so i’m not having to compete with a armada of bland looking Malls that use an army of non-shopping camper bots.
Recently for my sins I decided to start cutting parcels for the majority of my Vendors (110+) outside their spots, placing their logo, their own landing point and selecting keywords based on the products that i can see in front me. Trust me, it takes hours and hours of work in just selecting the keywords alone, not to mention the weekly parcel search cost that i incur! It was worth as i can see traffic and sales increasing ……however using the NEW SEARCH with the exception of a few obscure keywords, all that work seems to have been a waste of time from the results I have been getting. Oh well i guess i can save 2+k week on parcel search listings!!

What really gripes me when you type in “Malls” in New ALL Search, the top entry in Classifieds is Vodaphone!!!!!
What the hell has Vodaphone got to do with shopping malls???? Is this the sign of things to come?…..large corporations coming in and dumping chump change for classified Ads…. in this case 130k Lindens, to include every popular keyword under the sun to get prime position in ALL SEARCH in the classifieds sections.??
Will the top 8 classified spots eventually become a battle ground amongst Corporations for position as Joe Public certainly does not have that sort spending power?

Mind you Classifieds has always been borked for abuse. For example one finds top of the range Skin/ Fashion creators that produce the odd poor quality body shape list that in their keywords along with their 150K+ advert , whilst specialise creators of Body Shapes like myself, MAD Designs, A Lady & Body Doubles are buried deeper in the listings because we can’t afford to spend that sort of money. The existing system does not and will never favour smaller quality creators of any kind. Money talks!

As things stand now,I can forsee businesses creating multiple duplicate prims to increase the cross linking for higher search placements. The bigger the land you have available the better! It actually might be cheaper and more effective to rent a SIM for around 110 K/ $400 USD (or 27.5K L per week), build a main shop and dump 14k of duplicate prims as opposed to paying 30k/pw for a classified advert that might not be listed in the top 8 classifieds anyway. Food for thought!

I can forsee even more ALTS being created so that they can join their own Brand groups and include their own business in PICKS due to the parameters chosen by LL.

I can forsee companies paying noobs to join their groups and asked to select their businesses in PICKS. Good for the Noobs i guess, another form of income!

As marketing costs mount up, i can forsee more businesses using Camper Bots as opposed to paying real or farmed campers, thats if traffic has any sort of impact on Searches.

Why won’t the Lab shut down campers all together?
Simple answer—> Concurrent users would drop like a stone from 50K to about 30k+—-> Bad publicity for the Lab—–> the Lab doesn’t like bad publicity!!

They always boast of 10 million registered users, but in reality i would be surprised if it were much more than 2 million unique identities.

In order to preserve one’s own businesses, it’s likely i will have throw business ethics out of the window and adopt the “If you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. Whatever it takes to keep my income stream from falling.

This whole concept of developing a NEW SEARCH engine, reminds me of several Accounting packages that i’ve stumbled across over the years, some of which were poorly developed with flaws, bugs and unable to even follow accounting principles! Why?
Many of these so called off-the-shelf-simple-to use (and surprisingly even larger ones like SAP) packages were developed by techies with little accounting knowledge and unable to understand the interaction required between different accounting modules or the data/ end product required from it.

I looks like a similar problem here, techies with limited business acumen are expected to develop a fair and all conquering search facility.

For this to work properly, Linden Labs will have to do something they are not very good at…..listen to their End Users!! LL really need to gather info from both Customers group and a Business group, to cover both ends of the spectrum.

Welcome WALMART………….goodbye Corner Shop

I'm not sure what the hubub is about on the walmart thing. I have a normal amount of items in my store for sale and show up at the top of my list like I should have all along, thank GOD I can start saving MONEY when this new search rolls out. I'm so sick and tired of competing with CLUBS to own a store. Think about it for a second. My MAIN keyword is Rave. Unless I have camping, I've always fallen WAY below the top. I never wanted camping. I'm pretty sure I'll never need it again to show up well, that's just awesome. So again, what's with the walmart comments, my business certainly doesn't fall under that catagory and I DO get the top spot. And NO I didn't pay a ton for a classified. My highest paid one is like $L5059 and I only have about 5 listed total, all but the 5000dollar one are paid for at like the $L50 range.

Some are going to have luck andgain a favoured position in these searches like i mentioned in my message. You struck it lucky with "Rave". I did notice however Ramos Designs (furniture, pre-fabs & jewelry) where the top listed classified under Rave ALL Searches.
I can't see the connection other than they paid 62k for an advert and had "grave" listed in keywords.

You did well because your company name is "Rave Nation".....how well did you do on the product searches i.e the type of articles you produced? If you make skirts, dresses corsets,top, jackets, blazer, pants etc ........which is the likely way to search products if people don't know your company name...........where do you figure then?


If you're pleased because your company name figures very high under "Rave" as opposed to product search, i don't really see this as beneficial. Anyone that knows your company would probably likely to be a customer or have your landmark already or know your location already. If i was searching "Rave" in all honesty, its because i'm searching for a club that plays Rave music and not for a company that is named Rave because a friend told me about the great clothes you make...i would do what i normally do with "word of mouth" referrals..."can you send me their landmark please". If they could not provide me a landmark....then i would search your company name until I found it, whether you were on top of page 1 or the bottom of page 9. The quickest alternative way to company location would be to ask for creator name and then locate their profile and look in either PICKS or their CLASSIFIEDS. I don't see much mileage your company name being on top of the tree for the word "Rave". When i type all my company names in, i'm exclusively the top of the list with all my locations and products......I expected nothing less!

I started out selling rave stuff. I intend to attract people into the rave genre, so by coming out at the top of rave, I will attract the right kind of people. Granted, I don't come out for the top of clothing, but I've never ranked high for clothing. I even tell people to find me by searching for the genre if for some odd odd odd reason they can't remember the name rave nation. So anyway, these are my reasons to be happy. I can't complain when I come up at the top of my genre. I certainly wouldn't expect to come out at the top of other things since I don't focus on things other than rave things much.
It's funny, I have been trying to axe the name rave nation in favor of something less genre specific, but I just keep having more reasons to leave it like that and just open a new store. I understand where you are coming from anyway when you say you don't feel like it's that beneficial to me, but I think ALOT of people are going to have to be a bit more creative with how they are found in search. I don't mind being at the top of my genre label
Oh, and maybe I should mention that the entire time I've had the store, I've only focused on bumping up the rave keyword in search. o.o It's always worked for me..I make enough money in world that I can't complain.

I will edit in that I can see how this could be a problem if people found you by searching in certain ways, but again, I've only ever come up high on the rave search.

Even as a newb though, I learned searching under the all field sucked, so most likely most people will just switch to the places tab when they figure out how confusing the all search can be.

I found a few similar strange ones.

Searching for "Camera", all of the top hits are pages on the LSL Wiki. Which isn't so great if you want to, you know, buy a camera.

Points taken Sae. If it's Rave type clothing you make and sell anyway, maybe Rave is a good additional keyword word for you....and you're successful with it.

I have often wondered which type of search was most commonly used......ALL, Classifieds or Places. I had always assumed it was coincidentally in that order too......but i'd be happy be told otherwise.

I have to wonder what the point is to buying a classified ad now, since it seems that only the most expensive ads get featured, and they don't rotate when going to new pages. If you're not in the top 10, forget about it, apparently...

Actually its top 8 classifieds on the right-hand side of ALL Search.

Yes, i'm wondering as well. I spend around 20k + per week on classifieds relating to all my activities.
I suppose once the new SL search becomes embedded, one could test it by not advertising for say 2 weeks and then comparing sales with and without classifieds.
If the results are marginal, there might be a good case to ditching classifieds completely or spend more and try and get into top 8. It really depends which type of Search is
most commonly used.......a good case study for any market research company I think.

Search all is a mess. If I want to find people, I go to... people. If I am looking for a place, I go to ... places. If I want to find a group, I search groups. If I wonder about employment, rentals, etc. I go to classifieds. Are people really so dumb that they would actually waste time by searching all?

I get the bad feeling that because Search All is kewl-looking, people will use it and the money I threw into classifieds is down the toilet. I had to go 19 pages in before I found my ad, which I paid 2k for. That's bullpucky.

I have almost never used the All tab. Groups for groups, people for people, and if I'm looking for a specific something I look in Places first, and then Classified, and I check land for sale by using Land Sale tab (and making sure that I have selected "mainland only".

Cristalle,

If what you say is true, (sorry, I'm not very computer-savvy and haven't tested this yet) then hopefully people will quickly forego KEWL-ness in place of usefulness. Most of my tenants tell me that they found my hotels through a classified search. Some of them were newbies several days old. I had assumed that everyone was too lazy even to switch tabs at all.

yes, i understand using the relevant tabs to search the relevant category i.e event, land sale,people etc etc. ......but supposing you were looking for say a Treehouse build......which category of search would you use?

I know during my Noob days, i use to search things first in SLEX, read all the product info & ratings, record creator name......and then locate profile & shop in world. I actually followed that methodology for a good while.

I guess in recent times i would have used a combination of Classifieds & ALL

I've never used the All tab before either. Thing is, there's a search box in the main screen of the new Windlight viewer, just like the search box in your web browser, and the results are always New Search. New users will probably never even see the old search dialog (which sounds like its days are numbered anyway) because this search is right there on the screen and works just how search works in web browsers.

Oh. I hope the old search with tabs doesn't go away. I have the new Windlight viewer that has the new search, but I didn't even try to search for anything. Was to busy flying around and looking at the pretty colors.