The new search

I'd like to know what the new 'search all' is based on. I mean, what decides the order of the sites listed there? It's certainly not traffic as you find them all listed totally different in the old 'search all'. I've heard that the classifieds are gonna be removed from the main list and be kept only in the separate list on the right hand side of the menu, but still, apart from those, there's a big difference between the order of the old search and the new. Can anyone make this a little clearer? Does the number of items for sale on the land have anything to do with the listing? In that case a freebies place would be the heaven on top of the list.

There's no way for us to know how to climb the list unless we know the mechanisms behind it.

What I find most odd is when you do certain keyword searches and have some obscure avatar's profile near the top of the listing. Like they were the most popular avatar in SL or something. Really silly.

Anniella
There are several threads on the subject in this forum, far to many to reference here. There is also a thread in which a Linden has input on the whole subject of the messed-up new search. You should do a forum search for 'search'..LOL... and pick the info' you need.
It does appear that IBL's are a major factor in ranking, though not the only one. Whilst the new search is a Google plug-in it is configured by LL not Google.

Here's the big one, called "Would you pay more than 50L for an ad under new search?"

/142/fc/226678/1.html

James Linden pops in and asks for feedback a few times. It's worth reading.

IBL?

*Anniella Googles* hmm.....International Basketball League...naw, can't be...eh...Image Based Lighting....hardly....Industry Based Learning.....???

inbound links.... people putting your store/parcel in their picks.

Hasn't traffic got any relevance at all anymore in the new Search All? Can anyone give us a full list of everything that's relevant for listing in this search motor and things that aren't relevant anymore? I want to know so I can adapt to it. I've read some earlier posts about it now, but can't seem to get a full explaination about how it works. Do we have to figure it out ourselves? I guess the camping units are going to be replaced by knickknacks now. I don't mind though as long as I know what's relevant.

Is price relevant?
Amount of items?
Traffic?
Objects for sale?
Objects not for sale?
Group members?
Number of people who put your place in their picks?
Payed ads?
Payed price for ads?
Number of small ads compared to one big ad?
Size of owned land?
Premium membership?
Sold items a day?
Time spent online?
How many strawberries you just ate?...naw just kidding
Whatever...........etc etc

Keywords are the first thing you should be looking at since that determines whether you'll show up at all.

The difference between the old and the new search there is the way they match: the old search required an exact match (skins would not match skin, "prefab house" would not match "prefab pre-fab house", the new one will match on singular/plural/possessive and separated words (although your ranking isn't necessarily the same if it's not an exact match).

You can use keywords in:
* the name of the parcel (gets preferential treatment)
* the description of the parcel
* objects for sale on that parcel that are set to show in search (buggy)
* the name of the pick to your place in someone's profile (needs to be exact)

Your ranking is what determines how far down your parcel will appear and depends on the number of other webpages that link to the page for your parcel.

Right now links come from:
* the "Parcels on this sim" page
* having the parcel in someone's picks
* traffic
* classifieds (one incoming link/classified) - removed or due to be removed

Traffic is practically worthless for the new search: if you're in the top 10 of popular places across all of SL, you get 12 links due to each of the "top xxx" pages. If you're in the top 10,000 popular places, you get 3 extra links.

Despite some claims, groups do nothing to boost a parcel's ranking. Events have already been killed as links, and now classifieds are gone as well.

Based on what Kitty is saying, I'd guess that a big reason why LL hasn't written out how the new search works exactly is because they can't stop changing it long enough for someone to document how it works. Hopefully they'll be more forthcoming once they get it relatively finished, but you probably shouldn't hold your breath.

Once it is documented how it works, the gaming starts. Once the gaming starts, the usefulness stops.

Oh, and it does not matter if it is documented at all. It does not take all that many "black box" experiments to find out how to game search.

a note on usefulness
day oh pointed out in another thread that it can make use of google site style keyword searching... so if you want to, so can you, inworld and out...

after you pick a search category you can use things like
intitle:"Linden"
for instance to only pull up profiles of lindens or people with linden in their name...

to do the same from your browser you can use
http://secondlife.com/app/search/search.php?q=world.secondlife.com/<category>/ intitle:"my search term"

categories are:
resident
place
region
classified
group

intitle may not be the only term that's valid and it doesn't need to be in there, but it's useful if you know the name of the object/place/av/group and only want those results and not some random avatar profile pick or somesuch

This is a done deal then? So I can quit running my classified ads?

This makes it a little easier: http://taterunino.net/searchform.html

I wouldn't count on that. Google is notoriously secretive about the exact scoring and algorithm in order to keep tampering down to a minimum. I would expect LL to be equally as secretive and to change parameters when they see them being gamed just like Google does.

http://www.google.com/technology/


There were some good tips here:
/327/12/227413/4.html#post1805535

that does expose a few more things that are useful, including shorter flags.... incorporated, thanks =)

I've been getting hits at my new place which is not even open or actually FINISHED yet ... despite a traffic of 23 yesterday (Cherry tp'd in, placed a nice angelfish emitter and left).

Since the new All search is powered by a Google system, I'll explain briefly one very important aspect of Google's Web search engine that is sure to be incorporated into the Google system that SL is using. Understanding it will help you to improve your All rankings.

Google uses more than one index. They store the words from page Titles and links to pages in one index, and everything else (all the page content) in a much larger index. When they process a search query, they first look in the smaller index and, if they can get a large enough results set from there, they don't even look in the larger one, where the page content is. It means that page Titles and link text are the 2 most important ranking factors. The link text is the most important of those 2, simply because a page has only one Title but it can have a great many links with text pointing to it. The page Title is the land's Name. Link text is the clickable text in a Webpage, and it is attributed to the page that the link points to. An SL equivalent is the text in a person's top Picks - maybe just the name, or maybe both the name and the Description.

With that little bit of knowledge, anyone can take steps to gradually move up the rankings for any chosen searchterm. Get the page Title right, and then the key to moving up the rankings is getting more and more links with the right link text.

Decide on your important searchterms (the phrases that people are most likely to type into the searchbox when looking for what you offer), and use the Title and link text to target them.

One more thing. Google ignores a page's Description tag in their Web engine because it was spammed to death, but the internal engine that SL uses doesn't expect spam, so the Description tag is most likely to be incorporated into the rankings, so write the land's description with your important searchterms in mind.