Have you tried SL's new search capability?

played with it last night! had fun putting our friends names in and seein the Kevin Bacon Theory play out with it.....although i think i also have display on web unchecked......

hahahahaha

Yeah, no one ever disagrees with me.

The difference is when I'm told I am wrong I don't get all publicly sniffly about it and say everyone is mean to me.

I've been personally attacked on these forums far more often than you have. You just don't see it because the name "Michael Bigwig" isn't involved.

True. Back on topic. I believe this feature will be used for marketing purposes in the near future, I do not wish to be marketed. I will opt out. If I cannot, then my profile will be empty. *Proudly wears her tinfoil hat*

Supposedly, even if you opt out, people will still see the avatar name, the 'born on' date, and the payment status. So one could still get targeted with spam for being a payment-on-file or payment-used resident, and therefore presumably being capable of spending money on the crud they are trying to sell you. But at least it doesn't, at that point, spell out all your groups and profile info.

Yes - I have three of those too !!

See... I would hate to blank my profile, but I guess I may have to get myself a tinfoil hat. I do think this could potentially cause a lot of spam and given the message limitations, it would be a very bad thing for me.


My 2c,IMHO, YMMV

lol, there's nothing there that's not in the old search... what do you guys mean, spam?

If you wish to see the future, gaze into my crystal ball...

If you turned off the Publish on web check box on your profile, the profile info was not published to the web. The old search was internal to the SL world. Now, they have arbitrarily turned ON that check box for all of us that wanted it off AND published our profiles on the very public web OUTSIDE of SL. Not only that, but they have very kindly provided our avatar keys to every web crawler that comes sniffing.

So, yes, our profiles WILL be searched. We WILL be marketed to inside of SL and LL has handed the spammers the keys to do it with.

In case anyone missed the blog post the new search system in in the latest Release Candidate.

secondlife.com/community/downloads-optional.php

I went through all of mine last night and the search has picked up all objects with the "Show in search" option checked - and some look as if they are for sale when they are not. That's another thing to have to check on edit now! (I'm referring to the checkbox on the edit drop down option when you right click an object and choose edit.)

Just checked it again and it seems I am still selling Welsh sheep according to the search engine and I know I have set them to 'not for sale' and they have no price set. Could the data be cached, so you do not pick up a new search each time?

i wonder how long things are cached for. there could now possibly be a record of every group youve ever joined, etc. dont much care for that because ive had to join quite a few seedy groups to place vendors out and such.

Lindens have said search can take 1 to 3 days to update

Old Search: Limited access to anyone who had a Second Life account. They at least had to know what SL IS, before gaining access.

New search: Available to anyone world-wide with a web browser, the vast majority of which would knot know that Caledon is a fictional location, or that Day Oh is not a real person.

Exposure has just increased by a factor of about a million to one, since there are probably at least a million times more people with Internet access than there are real people with SL accounts.

But I think there is an important difference. So suppose some spammer finds out Darien Caldwell is associated with Collars, cuffs, and armbinders. He wants to send her some spam for his new sex site. Guess what, he can't. The search doesn't include my email address. So it seems rather a non issue really. There is no way they can associate my Avatar with my Real Life, unless I was to go put in my profile "Hi, my RL name is blah and my RL email adress is [email]blah@blah.com[/email]". And I'm not going to do that.

It is true that they can't associate your AV to your RL identity or email address, however, LL does conveniently provide your AV's in world key with which they can spam your IMs from outside of SL. Now, they really don't care if they have your RL identity or email since it is still you, the RL person, reading your AV's IMs.

Do your IM's go to your email when you're offline?

Yes they will - if you have set that option on. Darien pehaps does not need to, but many residents need to do this because their IMs are capped - picking them up offline is the only way to be sure they don't lose any. I'm not at all happy about this - I get enough spam as it is.

No, that's not true (:

Um, better tell that to a certain maker of well known Rental and vendor devices because they are offering a service from their web site to IM people from their web site. Same technology can be used by spammers. Your AV key is all they need and maybe a bit of code using libSL.

Search for yourself on the web based system, click on your name to bring up your details and there, in the URL bar of your browser is your avatar's key, big as life and easily accessible.

Yeah, it's true.