New Search/All Rankings Don't Make Sense

Well I scooted up from page 19 to page 8 in (paid!!) classifieds by throwing a few more keywords in. Basically the formula is, hammer the description with the same keywords over and over again. When it comes to parcels, make sure you game traffic too with 50 bots on your land.

Well I have to admit that I'm much lower on a typical search for "sari" than I used to be but I ADORE the new "all" search. It's much more Google-ish and makes sense to the average Joe (or Jane.)

I would feel better about it if it made a little more sense. I would agree with Ann Otoole's post on the blog that profile picks and traffic should be deleted as inbound links for search all. People put friends in their profile without thought to where they are at the time, or all kinds of stuff that is not relevant to location. And traffic... well, see the Skin Oasis thread!

Have you looked at the statistics page recently in SL Website for economics?

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Estimated In World Business Owners
Unique Users with Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow (PMLF) 2
USD Equivalent PMLF May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007
< $10 USD 21,006 23,159 24,292 22,185 23,336 24,132
$10 to $50 USD 10,638 11,544 12,540 12,281 12,811 15,213
$50 to $100 USD 2,613 2,697 3,006 2,929 3,001 3,528
$100 to $200 USD 1,840 2,040 2,149 2,089 2,131 2,477
$200 to $500 USD 1,628 1,685 1,788 1,711 1,814 1,984
$500 to $1,000 USD 674 645 727 681 683 872
$1,000 to $2,000 USD 389 422 441 391 432 473
$2,000 to $5,000 USD 288 273 279 295 285 320
> $5,000 USD 139 132 145 129 138 157
Total Unique Users with PMLF 39,215 42,597 45,367 42,691 44,631 49,156

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Dont underestimate your self, as you can see the largest group are the ppl earning 10 - 50 dollars a month at around 13,000 people. 13,000 x $25 ( average ) amounts to a lot of money. $325,000 to be precise per month.

Then add up the other smaller amounts and they add up to more then the 2.5K monthly incomes in dollars I imagine.

Im crap at maths so forgive me if my equasions are wrong.

SL's economy is based on a metaverse and as such , it should reflect a real business economy and that means spending money for adverts and developing repeat business.
Theres no trick involved from LL point of view and who can blame them for wanting to take a slice of the pie too for classifieds?
They are providing a service just as Google charges lots of money for premium key words and advertising as should LL.

I must say however I am totally confused at this stage. I removed my campers assuming they played no part and was glad to see them go actually.

LL are all for explaining how to use this search from the customers point of view but its all a bit cloak and dagger from the business side.

I'll get my head around it but just as campers pushed new and lesser quality stores up the search list, it never effects the sales too much of more established businesses as they should have a good customer base anyway. Most of my customers find us through word of mouth. I have paid thousands of dollars over the yrs on advertsing on websites, radios, classified etc and they never paid off. 95% of my customers were refered by a friend and so I dont worry too much about being No one on any list anymore, sure noobs will go there for a while but only until they discover or hear about better stores. Once they visit a better store, they wont go back to the fake low quality ones who faked their place on the list or bought it. And repeat customers are the back bone to success in any business as is word of mouth.

My opinion after 3 yrs in SL as a business for what its worth

I think this is exactly the confusing part though - as long as the "top 10" rule for classifieds exists, LL will probably be making _less_ money out of them. Yes, the people in the top 10 will pay huge amounts, but they already do. All that changes is that more of the low-income people you referred to will realize they have no hope of getting into the top 10.



But that's exactly the point - as long as "more established businesses" dominate, anyone new who wants to start a business will have a huge problem - plus, any real-world brand that enters the world will be a devastating competitor because those brands are far more 'established' than even the biggest SL businesses.



You're quite right that word of mouth is valuable, but the process has to be jump-started somehow.

Other than giving the top 10 paying classifieds more visibility I really don't see what has changed.

If you Search / All classifieds still turn in the regular search results so there would be no reason to cancel them since they're still listed.

Search all classifieds SHOULD operate that way. It is not fair to take those who pay (through the nose, sometimes) for visibility and stick them on page 21. Otherwise, there is no point in paying more than 50L for an ad.

I have a jira on this because it is wrong to put a 62L ad ahead of one that is 20300 when all you are looking for is classifieds.

Search all, without limiting to classifieds or any category, should return a result that is based on relevance. But in terms of classifieds only, it should return results in paid order, just like if you went to the classified tab.

What has changed, is that the 11th top paying classified is now way down the list, as Cristalle said.

That is so basic a statement it is amazing people will disagree with it.

I know I welcome the changes. The idea of adding relevance to the search tool is a key to make... relevant places and businesses thrive. I'm tired of seeing that only campers and prices of classifieds help people to get to the top of the results. I'd like people to battle for relevance instead.

Sure, some will try to find holes and exploit them. But having more complex functions than just plain traffic and ad prices is a welcome addition.

You know, if I am shopping for (therefore typing the keywords) christmas decorations, I want the first results to be relevant.

I also want fair rankings for my business and I hope that the new search can help with that. Many business owners have plenty of reasons to like the move towards relevant results.

In comparison, we can whine all we want about Google, but it introduced a higher relevance in the Web search universe. Why shouldn't we have this in SL? Because we absolutely want campers to decide which places should be first in rankings? Nonsense!

Has anyone done a search of classifieds only in search all? It's ridiculous.

You'll find a line or two of substance, if you can call it that, and then 8 -12 lines of keywords to hammer the desired search term home. For apartments, I think if I took out a couple of lines and repeated the word about 6 more times than I already do, I would hit #1.

I reject the notion that someone who pays 50L and has a vendor in a mall somewhere that happens to pummel their ad with the right keyword should get better visibility than someone who pays 90000L, like Naughty, X2, etc. if they limited their search to classifieds.

Visibility is what you pay for. Some people cannot afford to pay much, some people simply refuse to pay. The first is unfortunate, the latter is just obstinate. The saying that it takes money to make money is pretty much a truism.

And this would be great if the search engine was actually clever enough to look at the products that a person is selling, rather than just the words in their search entry, but unfortunately it isn't.

What that means is that "battling for relevance" is a matter of keyword padding, link padding, and generally spending time gaming the search engine rather than actually making quality products.



Google succeeded because it did a better job of detecting the "big sites" and sending people to them. But in SL that's not necessarily such a desirable thing.

I think that both your comments are linked there.

The new search tool does have some of the early Google's spirits. It is still in its infancy and I am sure it can be refined. But I've done searches for all kinds of things with it and it does improve the quality of results. It's a matter of time before we see it develop fully.

And the success of Google is not just a matter of finding big sites, I think. You can find diamonds in the rough its search relevance.

It sure is nice to be able to put "scripting classes" in in quotes and get just the things that have that exact phrase.

And to be able to use the hyphen in front of terms to keep them out.

Now if we could have some fields that aren't used for search ranking - so people would have a place where there's a reason to try to put words designed for humans to read.

I wonder if you could incorporate a grammar checker into a search system - not to check for being "good grammar" but to decrease the rank of items when they have meaningless sequences of keywords.

But Google _is_ focused on finding the best established sites - because that's what the typical user of a search engine wants. It used to be the case that it searched based on how many links your page had to it from elsewhere; now it does the same, except it also checks how many links those referrers have from elsewhere too and ranks the value of their linkage according to that. You can tell when Google has identified a big enough or significant enough site, though, because it's when it starts putting sub-headers in the search to identify different parts of the site. (Google "second life", and you'll see that - it finds subheaders for the "My Account" section, for example.)

But Google has _never_ been designed to help new sites become more visible. In fact I've seen whole articles written about the stagnating effect that Google search has. They might have changed the algorithm since then. The adverts placed on the right hand side are fairly useless, as everyone learns to filter them out. In fact, a paper I read once on user interfacing said that 70% of naive computer users who were asked to visit http://www.census.gov/ and find out the population of the US, missed it - because it's in a coloured box on the right and their brain's "remove google ads" reflex has become instinctual!

What I want to know is how do you list your items when they are selling from vendors instead of from single prims that let you buy their contents. I have far too many skins to be able to devote a prim for each and sell through the buy contents feature. Instead I have scripted vendors that use the pay feature and while I have renamed these to appropriate names and set them to show up in the search (which they do) I cant have a price next to each item as they are not buyable. This makes it look like spam to the casual observer and maybe even to the search engine when in fact I have more items for sale than those that can devote a prim to each ((

Yes I agree its hard to get noticed. Been there and done that. But how different is it on google? If your new and have good quality merhcandise then you have to make all and often more of your profit into marketing and advertsing.
Campers, Classifieds what ever it takes to get that 1000 or so customers who buy your goods and spread the word. Once you have sold enough items to enough ppl the rest takes care of itself.

When I was a new store I used to come to the forums and reply to posts asking for textures and was swamped with other posts replying to the original saying " goto X store I have used them for yrs and would highly recommend them" and mine was totally overlooked . I would rant and rage with other txtr stores saying how I wish X txtr store would give us littles ones a chance.

We ALL start at the bottom but you have to learn a business strategy to be seen for me it was identifying a gap in the market what X store didnt offer and bringing that to SL
PPl flocked in to buy them and soon word of mouth did the rest of the work for me.

We didnt have campers or classified back then or even direct TPs ( it used to be a TP in a sim and you had to rely on passers by ! ) it was tough so I wouldnt have walls on my store and my business was literally passers by for many mths. The only advantage was there were less stores less competition but equally less customers and ppl

There isnt a 'fair' way to make your business succeed SL isnt a game there are no rules as such the winners are the good business ppl at the end of the day.

It isn't - and that might be a problem with Google. Google indexes general websites, but Second Life isn't the Web; Second Life is a closed environment with a commercial interest in user retention.



I was around for telehubs, remember! And there was, also, a markedly different attitude at that time. And no campers made it easier for regular stores to get a reasonable placement in the regular Search.



That's true, but doesn't allow for this change to Search.