Searching in Classifieds

First post so go easy on me

Why is Classifieds such a mess? I search for furniture and everything you can imagine is listed. Should it be this difficult to just get a list of furniture stores? Maybe I am expecting the impossible.

make sure you set it for *shopping* and not *all* and try to be specific.ie: table, sculpted,antique whatever

..and most importantly of all dont just go to the top few stores listed...look down a few pages

Because everyone games the search system by using every word they can think of when describing their product, store, club, whatever - and LL doesn't really seem to care how useless it has become (or they just can't figure out how to make it better).

I have to agree with you Pink. This is one reason XStreetSL is so popular for its easy searchability. In world its almost useless because people are allowed to spam bogus events as well.

Go easy on you? Ha!

Well, okay, just because you asked nicely. But let us know when you're ready for the whole hazing ritual. You know you wanna.

Right, so, all of Search is a mess, and Classified is no exception--although unlike other categories, Classified at least gives you a clear idea of how much the merchant spent on the ad (for whatever good that information does you).

Another problem is that there really are hundreds--probably thousands--of places in-world that sell something in the furniture category. And because "furniture" is a popular search term, it will be included in the ad text by almost anybody who has furniture for sale--and by some who don't.

It may help to try more specific search terms. Also, I only ever use the "All" category of Search these days, filtering for "Places" in the pulldown menu on that page. I don't know why, it just works better for me, but Your Mileage May Vary.

Now, the following is not an ad: I make my own furniture and neither buy nor sell the stuff, and don't know the creators or anything about them or the store, but I've recently stumbled on Abiss, and it's given me some ideas for what I want to build for myself. Maybe it's worth a visit just to get a sense of fairly high-end SL furniture.

Oh, and the way I stumbled on it may be useful to you, if you haven't tried it before: when I'm exploring and see something I like, I right-click on the object and Edit it, look at the Creator, open their Profile, and see if they might have a Pick to their store. At least for me as a customer, the most effective advertising is cool stuff other people already have.

Thanks for your replies.

Anjo, I find Events almost impossible too. Looking for building classes under Education is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Same with games and contests, so many are ads for stores or land. It seems LL doesn't care what state their search system is in.

Qie, thanks for your reply and I will check out Abiss.

I did contact the creator of a chair I really liked and asked if they still sold it since it wasn't in their store but a week later still no reply so will look elsewhere.

Also going to try searching All instead of Classifieds.

Thanks

It never really has worked that well, but I can see a plus side to that. I sometimes stumble onto interesting things I'm not really looking for but might be in the future.

I know that's frustrating, but it has a certain kind of charm too.

Using Boolean search in Search All to get to what you want always gets me the stuff I am looking for.
But at one side we have people complaining about search being gamed too much to be useful, and in another thread someone was very very happy to finally find out they can search by using + signs (+classic +furniture). One of the most basic pieces of functionality in search queries these days.
Search All is NOT gamed so much it is not useful. Searching XStreetXL does not work when you search for just "furniture" either.

So what I wonder... isn't it about time to teach the masses about using Search All, instead of complaining about the gaming?

Sure it does! It just nicely brought up these categories for me , Living Room, Bedroom, Outdoor, Multi-Room (each of the former with thousands of items, the following with hundreds), Dining Room, Erotic (Adult Content), Office, Kitchen, Nursery, Chests and Cabinets, Fireplaces, Home Office, Bathroom, Bookcases and Other Shelving and Recreational Room.

They can be subsequently searched within and sorted by price, prims, perms, age, etc...

LOL, and you have 18 Living Room listings, 15 Dining, 11 Fireplaces, 9 Bedroom and 3 in Chests and Cabinets...

Oooo, I just had a great thought, what if the XSt search was brought to inworld events?

You can also search all and tell it what terms to exclude, e.g., -sex, -xxx, -hair, -clothing, so that you can filter out people who are selling everything under the sun and might have one piece of furniture for sale.