New Search/All Rankings Don't Make Sense

I think that IS the point.

Get the most money possible out of the top ten spots, with everybody vying like mad to pay more and more.

A plus: Drive smaller SL-only businesses out of business. I don't think LL really likes us that much anymore anyway. We're a pain and a bother, a silly game artifact, who've outlived our time and usefulness (which was serving to get the attention of the real world, and real-world businesses).

The real-world businesses LL wants can easily afford huge amounts of money for classifieds, if they choose to use them. Real businesses make LL feel important. As long as we're around with our little pixel SL products, we make it look like a game, and that embarasses them now. They've moved past that.

We are not the world; we are the past. We're not only chopped liver; we're chopped liver past its prime and now heading for the garbage disposal.

On the plus side, I've been thinking: This business of dividing up SL artificially into "SL" - the world, for regular chumps; and the "Grid" - for the important people, such as IBM or Harvard - which they have already done on the web site.

Could this possibly be the harbinger of the day when they actually physically put the two groups onto separate grids?

So much do I hope that. There is no way - and I've said this from the start - that regular residents with SL-only businesses can possibly ever survive when thrown into the same ring with multinational corporations (not to mention the entire world wide web and google) as if we were separate real-world web sites and corporations, selling actually physical cars, clothes, etc.

And even if the real-world corporations weren't in the mix, this new search would still serve to make the SL businesses with the most money and visibility only more so, and the rest, less so.

But I think that is good, though, as far as LL is concerned. Ultimately they may have only ten such SL businesses left to deal with, as sort of token trophies to prove that regular people can make money here, in case anyone is still asking about that.

coco

Oh, and guys - here's a question.

Where did this new search come from? It bears a striking resemblance to the ESC search. Did they buy it from Google?

coco

Coco, if you drive people out of business, you drive people off land and out of the game. Less people paying tier, less people buying L - that is a lose-lose situation. I see what you are saying, but I can't agree. I think this is some really f'd up implementation that is designed to give the little guy a chance. In the searches I ran that were relevant to me (apartments, properties, rental, prefabs), I saw plenty of 50L, 100L ads ahead of mine. I saw plenty of groups much smaller than mine. I saw where people who had bigger holdings than me came after me (but still 20-40+ pages in). It was nuts.

I couldn't make sense of it. Needless to say, I didn't do much in way of preparing for the new search, so it's my fault. I will own up to it. I will see what happens in the next few days as my changes take time to propagate. But it's disconcerting. I am going to be really pissed if, after paying almost $300 a month to LL in tier, and even more for advertising, I cannot be found in search because of some boneheaded implementation.

Guess who will no longer give a shit about how pretty her mainland is.

I will, however, give it a go to try to conform to the system as best I can, by putting in appropriate keywords.

Jury is out.

I dunno,

the Percentage of people who pay their teir by selling stuff is pretty small.

Landlords is a larger number but still relatively small.

Kind of like Real Life.

Running the smaller content creators and landlords out in favor of the Big names might not hurt them all that much.

Im sure theres some big name island owners would happily gobble up a bunch of islands (and tenants!) on the cheap.

Kind of cynical, but also possibly true.


I have a friend who echoed similar thoughts.

And shes a pretty well known name in the lingerie biz. But for clothing sellers shed be pretty far down the list.

She figures Victoria's Secret or some place similar will eventually move in and run her out of business by giving away clothes.

Classifieds show up in the results along with everything else though, although money paid doesn't really seem to be a determining factor by itself.

I do hope they tune down the relevance of profiles on keywords though. "I love to shop at ETD" isn't a result I want showing above the actual ETD store (doesn't actually happen with ETD, but I can't remember what storename I used ). Stronger keyword matching would be good too, it seems to favour synonyms above the actual word searched for.

I never used "Search / All" before since it was too cluttered and mixed to actually return useful information, that has just gotten worse now. As long as they keep Search / Places like it is now I'll be happy .

Comments are still open in Jeska's blog. I just commented about taking away the bandwidth/packet loss in favor of this monster that directs people to search all.

You may be right, Cristalle.

Another question - someone said there were no groups listed anymore. Is this just a temporary thing, or what? how are we supposed to find groups without the groups category?

We would have to search through everything else in classifieds that has the same thing, right? Like if we wanted to find car groups, of car sports afficionados or something, we would have to look among everybody selling cars, etc., right?

coco

I'm beggining to think i haven't got the right download. I downloaded the most recent one they offered on the login screen.

I see places listed by traffic stats
classifieds listed by the amount people paid for them
the all section about the same except the groups and avatars are missing
groups listed in the groups section
avatars listed in the avatars section

my ads are placed the same and in looking at placement I decided next week i will move mine up by paying a few more lindens (as in the past). Keywords have always counted in SL search engines and I treated them like any other search engine and this method is still working.

Maybe i'm not in a competitive niche not sure? hard to tell ?

I saw one new guy trying to break in and that's about it but his ad cost more then mine so in classifieds he was a bit higher then mine. There were the usual people who if they had one item in that category added the keyword (which of course is to get traffic ..). My place is pretty specific so its limited to keywords that fit it. I have other superfluous things that I may advertise using a 50L ad from time to time. Other then that all is the same.

I can pull up an avatars name. I can pull up my group

I'm confused?

If anyone needs help getting their ads to rank let me know I have done it for a few others who were unable to get traffic and it was only the keywords etc they were using nothing more?

Wilhelm, it's test software. You have to go to the test software section and download the release candidate, or the Windlight first look.

I don't know about that, Colette. A lot of land is held for business purposes. And those who only hold small parcels, but make a few sales a month may still make their tier, or make enough that they don't mind paying for it. But the larger you get, the more invested you are... and if you can't be found, there should be hell to pay.

oh okay thanks

eh hrm okay

well maybe then money means nothing in classifieds any longer I will go download that and hope my computer doesn't blow up or something (but I will wait till later this evening )

thanks

I think we are thinking on differing time scales.

LL's long term goal could be for most content to be very low cost for users, provided as advertising by large companies.

Most land parcels will be through large land lords who either hold private sims or their own servers (open source)

I am sure you are right this new search isn't intended to drive off small business in SL. However the long term goals have a definite possibility of favoring larger business.

In the lingerie example, The Victoria's Secret Island could offer free lingerie for your AV, which comes in a folder complete with a snazzy new notecard that functions as a coupon to buy REAL LIFE lingerie from Victoria's secret .. clicking the handy in notecard link to get you to Victoria's secret 2D website.


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I'm just using Victoria's Secret Company as an example.

Actually, I think LL is trying to save network resources by making a Search that's so useless no one uses it.

*shrugs* I've tried it. Compared to the Search we ahve now, the new one sucks worse. Easier to search, but you get all the bullsh** returns that have nothing to do with yoru search (typical google).

And this buisness of listing every item for sale on parcels is just stupid. The list isn't organizable. Neither by name, nor by price. Which makes it USELESS. Needle in haystack anyone?

LL is going to make finding anything in SL a complete PITA. Looks like we're back to word of mouth and trading LM's. Might as well scrap the whole Search function to save resoruces, imo.

It's really sad because I like to do a Search for items I'm looking for and go to the BOTTOM of the current lists to find the new creators on the market. There are some truely talented people who are there just starting out.

And yeah yeah, I'm a whiner complaining about change. Whatever. My buisness won't be hurt by this. Why? Because I don't advertise. At all. What this new "improved" Search is going to do to me is hurt me finding anything to spend L$ on. Guess I'll just start cashing it out and taking it out of LL's pockets.

~Jessy

well i downloaded the new one and honestly it works like a standard engine (the all area) but the other areas are identical to what they were before.

The difference appears to only be in whether the land is privately owned or group owned. I hate deeding land to group makes me nervous but as an experiment and cause i find this stuff uh interesting (yeah i'm strange but we already know that). I deeded it to the group that the land is really used for as before it was privately owned by me. This appears to be only thing that made my ranking drop (a bit not much though but i'm in a smaller niche maybe?) Anyhow in knowing this I anticipate on moving up the rung on the ladder by a couple of slots.

I like the ads on the side but it will cause a lot of competition for highest paid ad (not that there wasn't competition before). Keywords still mean a lot of course. I have no idea about traffic mine is always low but my teleport number is always high the actualy traffic count is usually half that of the amount of ports i get.

Since everyone who gets a freetbie from me gets a landmark i have no idea if that is much of an influence because everyone does this.

groups do show up as do individual avatars and there is less listings per page. Also despite the fact that people hate bots i like the fact that my objects are listed on my land and fit the venue of what i actualy sell. This will cut down on people using false keywords a bit unless they like to setup mock boxes and put price tags on them in which case they will be ripping off a lot of people and that will earn them a pretty bad rep.

So ifi search for houses or cars the listing pulled up gives me a lit of what houses and cars are available and for what prices if i click the more button on that listing

eh seems okay to me for what it is.....

Searching in the all tab and leaving the default to "any category" gives me crap results. Absolutely useless crap results.

However, when I go to Search>All and choose "Places" in the drop down menu, I get much better search results than I did under the old search using the Places tab. My store shows up much higher in the rankings as well - even on the first page for some keywords.

I think the new search will work much better if people specify the types of results they want from the dropdown in the All tab. If you're looking to shop for specific items, choose Places and it will pull up what you want more effectively than it did before.

I like having the items for sale on parcels listed. Makes it easier to comparison shop and see what people actually have in their stores, which is sometimes quite different than what they advertise.

Well, I finally saw the new search tonight and I'm not pleased. There are FREE ads ahead of mine when you search on UK Couture, and my business name is Honey's UK Couture, and I PAY for my ad!

This REALLY sucks.

they aren't ads they are lots as in stores the ads are not in the all section much most of the listings in the all section using the new search are buy the property name so just make it engine friendly and it will list (eventually). This thing uses a spider(bot) whatever from what I can tell so its taking it awhile to get round to fixing your listings. If you look in the classifieds section your ad will rank properly also if the ad is in the top 10 price wise it will be viewable in the short list of ads on the right hand side just like with "regular" search engines

No, it's working exactly as intended. There are tons of places named UK Couture, and many of them pay more for their classified than you do, and probably get more traffic, so that's why they show up higher in the search. There's no such thing as a free ad - everyone pays the same to get their store listed in the parcel search.

The problem is that if LL go that way, they could find themselves walking a very thin and dangerous tightrope. They are never likely to shut down SL's editor, but if the experience of SL becomes that users can no longer expect to ever be able to distribute things they've made effectively, or even to pay back tier by making them, then SL loses its unique feature and drops right back to the level of IMVU/Kaneva/PS3Home. And that's bad because those worlds provide their _own_ content, and thus can respond to users much more than LL could if they were depending on external brands to provide it for them.

more fun...

Search all and limiting to classifieds does not pull up classifieds in paid order. Someone with a 50L ad who pummels the description with the same words over and over will get placed higher than someone who paid a hell of a lot more. That has to change. Otherwise, there is no point to paying more for a classified.

I am unhappy.

I have made a (useless?) jira. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3204

Fields that used to be for human to human communication are now being put to an additional purpose, determing search rank.

So, if you had chosen to include some clever words supporting some cause near and dear to your heart, you might be able to promote your cause more effectively by including a well thought out list of keywords and links and group names, etc.

If in your About statement you denounce crooked businesses by saying "JohnJill's Doe's ViperGlovesExpress store is crooked as can be! ", you will have raised the ViperGlovesExpress search ranking, right?

I've had picks with locations like the old Ahern Morris welcome area, for nostalgia and sheer laziness, but by leaving those picks that way, instead of setting them to, say, the NCI and Shelter locations, I'm decreasing the search ranking of NCI and the Shelter, compared to what I would be by including them there.

Anyone know what use is being made of what we type in as search terms?

Puppet, next to some of the UK businesses ahead of me are listings that do NOT say "paid ad", while others (including mine) say "paid ad".

And it's not about the parcel search, it's about paying for the classified ad.

So, what is it that I'm not understanding?

I agree with you, Yumi.

Colette,

I think the corporate-led vision of the future you're describing would cause many of us, including myself, to have no interest in SL. Who would voluntarily subscribe to a giant ad farm?

I'm sure that despite all their faults, LL knows that big corporations aren't very popular in SL, and allowing them to hog the economy would be a disaster.

The best thing to do is to continue to voice your opinions, submit your JIRAs, and ignore RL corporations in SL.

Well, unless you're a friend of a linden, or one of those (apparently unemployed) techie types that can attend EVERY oddly timed office hours, you're kinda out of luck. It'll be gamed, but instead of being game-able by everyone, it'd be a few 'in the know' folks doing it.