Bye Bye Traffic Bots/Camping

Just caught this before as my post hit the screen. Marcel, first of all, its Gabriele, not Gabriella. Secondly Yes I my post was leaning towards the insulting side, I admit it. Not Phil's first insulting post of the thread nor of the forums in general though. I have already stated it was the last straw for me. I have seen Phil, bully and attack people in this thread and others for long enough and now when he has the audacity to come to the forums and tell us whats best for us in terms of search after he cheated at the original search then yes I felt it was time to tell how low and full of hypocrisy I think his actions are.
Most people need to tell someone what they think of them from time to time. This was my time. I do not make a habit of it nor will I but Phil had this coming in my view.

It is important to remember a few things here:

1. Phil wants traffic to go away. He doesn't want to have to use bots. More on this later.

2. We cannot conflate results with presentation. Yes, both are part of the implementation but one should not be thrown out because of the other. We need to make it clear what is more useful. Honestly, I have no idea who the hell comes up with the UI changes and who the hell they consult with. Phil is focused on the results, but many people are more angry with the UI. Keeping those things separate will keep the discussion more focused.

3. Phil wants to see relevant results in search, as do most if not all of us. We all SHOULD know that any search tool is not going to be perfect and that NO search tool will be a true indicator of quality. Quality is also a subjective matter. Bigger, more popular store with lots of picks doesn't always translate into quality. Search is not going to remove the task of actual shopping if that is what you use it for.

4. Search is not just for shopping. It also has to locate non-profit and educational things for exploring. It is not going to be perfect. But as has been explained before in other threads, the system expects the listings to be accurate and honest and puts priorities on certain things (prominence, etc.). Phil has given people the tools to largely equalize the playing field but if they don't use it, that is not his fault. If he was the singularly greedy bastard that some people make him out to be, we would never have known as much about how it works and search would be an even bigger mess than it is right now. A lot more of us would be even more frustrated because we wouldn't know how to get better rankings.

5. Phil has used bots to his advantage because he treats his business like a business, not a hobby or a game. Search all is not just a directory but a limited marketing tool that, if others would play along correctly, would make the differences between similar places marginal. It is not cheating. But because people don't want to play along, you have vast differences in results. Phil makes the equivalent of a rl living off his SL business, and it is foolish from that perspective to not employ every angle he can. Right now he has a large competitive advantage mostly because of people's resistance to change.

If I understand you correctly, it would need something like an images search adding, but SL isn't yet a system where each item is imaged. I think places like SLX are good with images, but only in a very limited way. It would take some doing to add such a system to the SL search.

Images would still need text for indexing. How would the system know that 40 twisted torii is a singular bit of hair? Or what style? You cannot escape text.

No, I mean to use the SL engine itself for the search. Since we can search objects now, instead of displaying a list of text parcels, simply have the client move you to a blank "sim" (which isn't really hosted at all), fetch the prim models of each of the objects found, and render them in the 3D environment. A record is kept of the origin of each object and if you click on or otherwise interact with any of them, the interaction is passed on to the real object in the sim it came from.

DING DING!

wrong.....

Theres a few nasty tricks in the google search appliance, folks who are thinking that search engines can only use pure ASCII textual compliance are living in the mid 90's when yahoo was king.

The possibility to run internal searches on flatfile closed .flv files, closed flatfile .pdf and non ASCII compliant "dings" text is now here. If google was all about nothing BUT text searching then a blindfolded monkey with one arm tired behind its back could game the whole system of google web search, as it is, you cant...suuuuure you can jump up to the first page in a matter of days but then the nasty little tricks of the google appliance/search system kicks in and if your gaming the system you get your rear end kicked back down.

It's not really resistance to change, it's resistance to non-scalability.

It's a little like camping - not camping as in SL, but camping as in the older original online games. Way back then, "camping" meant hanging around a location which gave you some kind of benefit (like better guns or a location that was easy to guard) waiting for other players to come to you. Often doing this was a good way to win the game. The problem was, if everyone did it, everyone was just waiting for someone else to arrive, so the game stagnated. But if you decided to be the one who did not camp, you would lose to the campers every time. Thus most of the games had to incorporate mechanisms for banning that sort of thing before modern games fixed it with design changes.

This is the exact same problem with the search optimizations that Phil talks about. The problem is that, if everyone optimizes then nobody wins, except for the person who has a GSA at their office and knows exactly how they operate. So not doing so is a kind of mutual pact to prevent scalability problems.

Leaning towards? You outright accused me of something that, if you'd bothered to check, you could have know was untrue. It was a false accusation, so what's all this "leaning towards" stuff?

You are right about the forum, but wrong about this thread. I haven't posted anything insulting in this thread until you crawled out of the woodwork with the admitted intention of having a pop at me. You got what you deserved for it. I showed that your accusation was totally wrong (it's still checkable), and I insulted you in retaliation for making it.

You might want to ask youself why this hasn't been my first insulting session in this forum. You might consider your own experience in this thread and ask yourself why Phil would insult you. If you do that, you might start to get an understanding as to why I've insulted people in the past. I don't start things, but I do respond to them. So don't come saying that I've insulted people in the past. I have, but the question is why. Just as in this case, someone started it, and I responded. By all means voice your opinions, but keep the insults and false accusations to yourself.

Darn and we were so close in the never ending thread Owe you an apology for misreading and spelling your name!

If I remember well, in whatever thread where Phil was involved, it was seldom he who started the bullying. Understandable to a certain degree, because he represents the bot owners for a lot of people. What I do agree on, and Phil knows that, is that as soon things get messy, he tends to get a bit too nasty. But to be honest, I think anyone who makes a posting into an attack on the person, looses. Arguments can gain respect, bad mouthing cannot.

Glad though you will not make a habit out of it

Quoting the entire posting is too long, but for who hasnt read it, its wordt reading. Chapeau Cristalle

hehe. But regardless of what filetype it is indexing, and it is capable of handling dozens of filtypes, the content is all reduced to just text

Yumi, it is a simple fact that if everybody optimizes, the benefit gets lower. But still everyone should.
It is like the bot problem: idealists would say: make a statement and do not use bots. realists say: yes but bots are already being used, so if I want to be successful, I should use the tools that are apparantly approved. Making a statement by not using them, has one result only: you wil not be found. It's simply not realistic to hope that no one optimizes, in my opinion it is even one of the most important things to do if you want to make sales.

Again.. the problem is that if you optimize, all that you do is to start an "arms race" and unless you have some reason that would give you an advantage in that, you'll lose, so why start?

This thread is a good example - Phil had a high spot in search for furniture, he posted tips on how to optimize for search, someone else did optimize and took away his spot, and so he found a new way of exploiting the system that he kept secret and took the top spot back again. The ultimate result was that the person who took the spot from Phil might as well not have bothered. Unless you have privileged knowledge of the GSA, you'll lose the arms race, so why start it?

That's exactly the reason why a search engine is used to make your searching easier.
You look for "something" (it may be a document, an object, a person.. whatever..), in the world (or in second life) there are a certain number (usually large) of these "things", that would be almost impossible to see them all all together, so a search engine comes into help showing you the most "interesting" things before the other (with "interesting" i mean that would match what you are looking for, "guessed" by the search engine).
In your example so you will land into a megasim with all these result, *but* the virtual objects that are nearest to your visual *must* be the most "important" ones, and there our problem starts: how you decide wich comes first?

So your idea doesn't solve the "technology" problem, it would be a GUI tweak... but i agreed already on that point, we should talk about the interface, because the search method (google engine) is already good (or the best available).

I don't use Google to search for "things", I use Google to find information, there's a big difference.

You could use Google to find a new bed, but that would end up rather frustrating giving the amount of irrelevant results that would creep in.

Or you could use Google to find furniture stores in your area and then use each store's specific search to look for beds.

Google even has Froogle specifically for finding "things" because a general purpose search engine just isn't very good at finding specific "stuff".

---

If LL is determined to turn SL into a big web site it might as well go all the way and combine a SLex/OnRez approach with the new search. Separate "items sold on this parcel" from the places listing and provide a search that understand what things for sale are and associate a texture with a prim that's set to "Show in Search".

That way you could:
* search for furniture stores and tp on over just like we do now
* search for furniture stores and narrow-search each specific store for whatever you want and see a picture of it. You could do that for 10 different stores and keep the three results you like most, instant tp over to where it's displayed (get rid of annoying landing points) and buy the one you want with minimum fuss (it also reduces the importance of ranking because you narrow your search *before* you ever tp on over)
* llimit the search to items only and use it like SLex

I completely disagree that if everyone optimizes it makes the effort null. In fact, if everyone optimizes, it OPTIMIZES for everyone. If you don't believe optimizing is crucial and necessary to have good things continue to be built in SL, go read the post about the person who is closing his wonderful sim because he didnt do any marketing and no one came.

Guys, the rules are the same for SL and RL...if you don't advertise, optimize and get creative...your business, sim, etc will go away. People who think the SL advertising somehow should only be characterized by good will, flying hearts and fairy wings don't understand how marketing in SL works and doesnt work. Or, they have enough RL money to fund their lovely creations and sims and dont care if anyone comes to visit or buys anyway.

For the rest of us...there is no such thing as "gaming" the system. People use the system, get creative, do things some agree with and things that some don't. This good vs. evil crap is so condescending and judgemental and also extremely subjective that it is a waste of energy. Go back and make your nice things, advertise and optimize or not and stop judging other people's character and morals. This kind of holier than thou stuff is what makes SL suffer...NOT bots or anything else.

You are missing my point, probably I was not clear enough.

It is simply not realistic to assume that people will not optimize for a new search system. There even has been a Linden blog entry about it. So yes, there will be a race for the top page. And we will have to keep watching our position, and adapting. But that is part of having a business. And if done right, I will not loose. But I will have to keep paying attention.

Take the World Wide Web for example. Would you say, if I create a website about my new business, that I just type the text, add the pictures, and sit back? Or would you say it makes more sense to research how I can get me business on that first page so everybody finds me?

Again, to make sure I get my point of view clear: No one has to start the war for search results, but it is there anyway. It's not realistic to believe that if I do not use it, no one will. In fact, being on the train in time, can be beneficial. Being on the train too late, makes sure I fail.
And really, the search is there for our benefit, wether it's the shopkeeper or the shopper.

That's why it was important to fill the description field of every object you sell and tick to "include in Search". LL even told you that from the outset....the keywords in the description should be representative of the object that you are trying to sell.

I fear some people here are trying to fit a square peg into a circular hole!

Good posting, you must do something with marketing It really says it all I guess.

Spot on, Jojogirl. Being as quality is purely subjective, it is more important to optimize just to be found.

Kitty,
Information in fact is stuff too. You want to know somethng, and Google, or another search engine for that matter, finds it.

If you know how to use search, you will get results. The WWW is getting bigger each day, so it gets harder to find what you want, but looking at myself I do reasonable well.

Your tips on how to improve search (the SLX part of it) are, in my opinion, much more worth filing a jira over, then the original jira you filed, but hey, thats me.

Read this part well people. It indeed were the Lindens who told us how to optimize for search. So it is kind of running behind the facts to say we should not.

It depends on what you're referring to.

If you have 5 stores that sell "apples" and are found when searching for "apples" and 1 store that sells "apples" but doesn't show up then obviously it helps if that store realizes they should probably point out they sell "apples";

So now every store that sells "apples" shows up when searching for it. Any further "optimization" just distorts how everyone naturally ranked.

The problem with that is the one who's prepared to sink the lowest and has no qualms about doing whatever it takes to get ahead is going to come out on top (just look at this thread for evidence of that), which is a system we had already and noone liked (except the people who profited from it, which again is evidenced in this thread).

Yes, but in ultima, if you don't lose someone else does. Eventually, it's going to come down to "deep secrets", and people who have more access to them than others. So if you know that the other person has friends at Google, better not start the race.



I would say it makes more sense to research how you can get on the first page.

But I would also say that the method of searching the World Wide Web as a whole is flawed.

And I would say the fact that happened to him is a flaw in the system which should be corrected in itself.



Or they think it would be better to change how marketing in SL does work. So that, y'know, people actually have an incentive to work on creating more than they do on marketing.