Bye Bye Traffic Bots/Camping

You don`t get the idea here, your think in a sencible way. But the reallly its going to happen like Novis said..........Wasting money no........when many were using bots in camping chairs just the same.........

If you were refering to me as thinking sensibly - thank you If not, why not???

I agree that people who use traffic camping may well pay for Picks, but there's something to remember here. Since the All search has been with us for months now, the people you are talking about are no doubt already paying for Picks, or they don't need them for high rankings (they have sufficient Picks). There isn't a new set of rankings to climb. So what is seen now is likely to be pretty much what will be seen in the future. I don't envisage store owners suddenly paying for Picks en-masse.

Well no, they won't have to, when they have all those idle camping bots that they can stuff full of picks!

Time to increase the size of my Puppet army.

If they are each Premium members or group founders, or do something that needs an html page for them, yes, but not otherwise.

They disabled the link: keyword in the search system, but prior, you could see how many links the several different "popular places" pages provided.

Has someone indicated that the "popular places" pages won't still exist in the system, providing links for those high-traffic parcels? And can you think of a way to see firsthand if those pages still exist? Unfortunately I didn't keep the URLs

When I did my grand experiment with alts a couple months ago, I found that all I had to do was buy $1USD in Lindens through LindeX to get them to show up in search.

If someone wanted to do it, it would be only $100 = payment info used status for 100 alts, and you get to keep the L$ you buy.

The pages do still exist. You can find their URLs in the search engines sticky in this RA forum.

Traffic is still used for rankings, but its effect in minimal. It's not even a ranking factor.

Do you think it'll really stop traffic-botting? People are still "using" the old non-functional LL voting stations.

I can't scroll the results and I can't click the links (I have to click 50-100 pixels below where I'm supposed to click which is oh so intuitive), so instead of a questionable search I now have to deal with an utterly useless non-functional search.

Even when it does work as it should it's less usuable, more cumbersome, suffers from all the single page browsing problems, has a reduced feature set, takes 5-30 seconds for any single page to load and is even more corrupt and fake than the old one where it was at least painfully obvious who deserved their ranking and who didn't.

Quite an improvement indeed .

well i would rather them put their money in the search for a higher spot than having the overpopulation we do now..
i'm so tired of body counts being the factor in the search..

There's a group that has a L$3k weekly "lottery", all you have to do is add the "contributing store" to your picks. The group has an odd 3000 members last I looked, don't underestimate the attraction of "free money". At least a few dozen were payment info on file/used so even if they don't get the full 3000 picks, they get a nice little boost.

That's one group, I'm sure there are plenty more and I know a few dozen stores who pull a "add us to picks and have a chance to get free goodies" scam.

The new search is just as heavily gamed as the old one, it's just less obvious in the results that all you get is manipulated, skewed results.

Personally, I think this is excellent. I was annoyed by the idea of traffic bots and campers having an effect on the search results - it lowers a lot of excellent places in the search listing that don't use them at all, and actually makes it harder to find the items or intresting spots I'm really looking for.

I'm a bit in the dark about all this, but do you mean only the picks of the three sorts of avatars you list count toward search rankings?

For an av's Picks to count as links to places, the av must have an html page for the links to be on. Only certain types of avs have html pages, so adding picks to general bots is useless. We had a whole thread on the topic, including doing tests.

I said (meant) it's a huge improvement on the traffic-only rankings. Of course the box needs to be fixed for those for whom it is faulty.

It may be a bit more cumbersome to use, but the quality of the results it produces are far superior to anything else that LL has, and several orders of magnitude better than ranking solely on traffic.

I didn't say it wouldn't happen. I said that a sudden mass change to buying Picks isn't likely to happen, because those who want to do it are already doing it. Very little will change in that repect because there are no new rankings to climb up.

I imagine it will, yes. To my way of thinking, people who use the voting boxes don't know much about things, and they must think they still count for something. People who use traffic bots, know exactly why they are using them, and exactly what the effect of using them is.

Those who use them, but know little about the new search, may continue using them, because they've heard that traffic still counts, although they don't know how little effect it has. So a few may continue, but I imagine that most will do the same as me, and take them down.

I was talking to a friend earlier who also far prefers the old Places over the new search and I jokingly said we should "miserable failure" googlebomb the new search.

It would be trivially easy to rank the first few results of the most common keywords with a link to parcels that points out how broken and easily it is to manipulate the new search and that it's really no different than the old one, just that skewing the results is non-obvious now.

Your perspective is always going to be the opposite of mine . I care that the results I get are accurate and represent an honest ranking, you care that you rank high at the expense of a fair ranking.

what i will love about this is the search will be kind of like when i first got into sl before camping was a factor..
you could find what you were searching for and if you couldn't it just wasn't in sl..
i mean bots and eating up all the keywords pulled a blanket over a lot of good places..you have to get a couple pages deep before you get into the content you really are looking for now days it seems unless you have a specific name of the place.

this may actually put some quality back at the top of the search and pop places instead of load it with places that play the search with tactics that are false numbers.

You can do that, but it won't affect the results, because "miserable failure" isn't searched on. The place you target will still be listed for relevant searchterms, and the results won't be skewed, so it's pointless doing it.

No no no no no, Kitty. I care that I rank high, because my goods merit high rankings. I don't care to rank at all for anything that I shouldn't rank highly for. So all my rankings are very fair.

And in the next sentence I point out that you'd want to it for the most commonly searched keywords, eg skin, animation, furniture, etc.

You can rank first for any keyword you want, all you need is enough picks named with that exact keyword and that keyword never even need be present on the parcel page at all. If you want a parcel named "I <3 the new search" with a description of "It's excellent!" and nothing for sale to rank first for "skin", you can, just get enough picks titled "skin". An exact match will beat a partial match with a higher score (although they do need to be in the same order somewhat).

The whole fact that anyone can directly influence the results to rank exactly where they want it is what makes the new search as irrelevant as the old one. The manipulation just isn't visible anymore so people think it's suddenly all better now.

Lost in translation.......

Sorry - I missed that

But anyone can't just go out and rank where they want, Kitty. They can bomb stuff like "miserable failure", but they can't just go out and rank high for things like "skins", "furniture", etc. They can achieve some success, yes, but not at the top. I'm not going into details, but 3ring started to get the idea in another thread, and I don't think there was a response to it.

Someone proposed using newbie campers as targets. That might work...

Sign #1:
KIDD'S COMBAT ZONE!
Pay this vendor L$200 for a one hour pass.

Sign #2:
You may shoot at anyone wearing a red TARGET tag!
If you shoot anyone wearing a green CIVILIAN tag, you will be ejected and banned.
You will earn a Proficiency Reward of L$10 for every 10 kills.
No area weapons allowed.
NO NUKES!

Sign #3:
Want to Earn Money?
Touch this sign for a TARGET tag.
You will earn L$2 for every ten minutes you remain in the sim.
BONUS! Earn L$5 for standing on a Target Pop Up Pad until you are killed.
Be quick! Be wary! There will be people trying to kill you.

I'm sooooooo telling the VTeam .