How LL could make bots irrelevant

In the bast ratings were gamed. After that voting for favorite places was gamed. Keywords have been gamed. Traffic is being gamed thru the use of bots. In my opinion LL should toss out the traffic metric completely and go with random results in search thereby giving every store an equal chance of getting costumers. Let's say you search for hair. The first search may get you Susie's Hair Store as the top result. The next may put Jane's Hair Emporium first.


Long term we'd all see more of SL's places and products than we do based on the present search metrics and honest creators who don't game the system would get more exposure. The bots would disappear off the grid making it easier for LL to keep our world running without grid-wide slowdowns. Win/win situation?

I would random results too simply because i would like to see more things coming up in search that I could visit.

That'd be gamed by creating multiple stores that occupy the same space.

actually i like this idea...a rotating list where everyone gets a random spot. cool

If you don't have some kind of relevancy system all you are going to get is random meaningless results because people will continue to do as they have in the past, which is simpy toss in every single popular search word in the land. You may as well not have search at all.

The desired result - "making it easier for LL to keep our world running without grid-wide slowdowns" - wouldn't happen. It isn't the passive, out of the way, traffic bots that cause problems - it's active avatars.

A disadvantage of what the OP suggests is that it would be pretty much impossible to redo the search and find the place you found not long ago. Reasonably stable search results are very useful for that.

The idea of getting rid of traffic-based rankings is good though, but through all the discussions in all the threads about how to list the Places tab results if traffic isn't used, I haven't seen any good method suggested. Randomising the results has come up a fair number of times before but it's not a good method. It may be a little better than traffic-based results, but that's all. The only real way of doing it is to get rid of the Places tab altogether, as it's much inferior to the All search. But that's a different topic. The OP imagines that traffic bots cause the problems we're having, but they don't.

Even if they don't toss in random keywords, under this system, a store that sells one style of hair among numerous random other items will have the same odds of coming up on top as a store that sells nothing but hair. Sure, people won't be able to game search, but no one will be able to effectively use search either.

I like the traffic count. For me, I can see if anyone has visited. I have a counter but the traffic stats give me an idea of how long on average each is staying around.

It's a bad idea to want to have random results in Search. Shops won't be able to specialize anymore or focus on one specific item plus keyword to find a niche in SL. When you specialise, you can target all your keywords on one specific market so your shop can be found. With random results, all other shops could put that same niche keyword in their description although they didn't specialize. If you want random results, you would eliminate all innovative niche ideas in SL.

It's not a good plan.

we can suggest until the cows come home but they are not going to change them..
the only way to get rid of people gaming the search is to not use them anymore.
i don't even go to page one anymore and always map the place..if it's loaded with bots or i see 20 bots spread out or more i go to the next one..i'm not funding the big time bot users anymore or giving them my traffic..
LL is not gonna do something so i'm adjusting to the gamers and not playing with them..

LL does not want to make bots irrelevant. Do you realize what that would do to the numbers?

Ditto that.. Any hint or suspicion of traffic bots and Im gone (BEFORE I add to their traffic number), reguardless of what they sell.

ok going to play stupid I guess or devils advocate but how do you know one is a bot? That still has me wondering?

Am I a bot cause I sit in my office and work on other stuff in my graphics program and/or not move?

Yes I been called that lol told them sorry I was away but that was not good in their eyes oh well. If that makes me a bot then quite a few are.

So what exactly is a darn bot?

Ok now sling away cause I know you all will

Bec

mainly a bot is nothing more than someone creating an alt and having them do a certain job for them..

some people create tons of these bot accounts placing them on their land to gain a higher spot in the places search..

well from looking at the map it's easier sometimes than not to tell..
usually a bot spread is pretty uniformed placement of bots around the store to make it look like customers or people there shopping..but some do a pretty bad job at spacing them randomly and you just know they are placed..

others are bot piles that are away from the main area most times up in skyboxes..
i'll sometimes port to these and if you look up most times you can see a skybox or two of bots/alts..my camera is set where i can look up there and see them..

some people use bots for good reasons like greeters or a couple of models for skins and things like that..

but you still have some that game and abuse that by placing a bot wearing every item they sell in the store..putting 40 bots in your store wearing your stuff is gaming it to me..

Cut them in half. It has to be done, though. It's only a matter of time before it becomes something the mainstream media will ridicule SL for.

i'm not sure who all their investors are but i am sure they have some influence..i was reading an article the other night and it went over the first years up to around 2007 i think..
their investers really never had a lot of faith until the first booms in 2006 and 2007 from the way it sounded in the interview ..

i can see it being hard to keep both sides happy..but you have to make sure you keep yourself alive..sometimes that takes bailing out the boat at the same time as it's taking on water until you catch a break and get a good hold on it..
this is all a guess..but their attention over time has pulled away from the residents more and to me it would make sense they are trying to keep investers pacified while the world is trying to kill them in the media..then there is us too the ever flowing new population..
and the grid needs fixing..
this is all a big guess on my part but i can see their plate pretty full..
they are the ones that eating from it..we are more or less along for the ride bumpy or smooth..

perhaps ll could remove traffic, then rework the land menu to add 'keyword fields'. stop looking at the land name and description and search only the entered keyword. arrange it so that there are a limited number of keyword fields, and increase the number of them as the plot gets larger. ie:
<512 = 0 keyword fields available
512-1023 = 2 keyword fields available
1024-1535 = 3
1536 - 2047 = 5
etc etc


LAND MENU
Parcel Name: n&b Exports: Furniture-Foo!
Parcel Description: sculpted, scripted modern furniture and decor.
Keyword 1: Furniture
Keyword 2: Sculpted
Keyword 3: Scripted

i think something like this would tighten up search and also give us some meaningful parcel names and descriptions in return.
Yes, it would favour full sim stores, but thats life imo.

and for those people that wont frequent my store because i have a handful of bots, bear in mind that even 6 bots makes a huge difference on sales for me. if i have to choose between bots and 1 or 2 people stomping off in a huff amongst 100 tp's today, or no bots and 10 tps while feeling 'ethical', i will choose the bots every time. $ pays my tier, not popularity amongst a minority (infinitesimal really) of bot-haters on the grid.

6 bots is not 20 or 40 shooting for the top spot in the search..i don't think people are talking about that..
you are being hit by them more than someone without a shop because they are cheating you more than someone that goes shopping..
i don't shop at the ones stealing the spots ..i'll shop at the ones that are being hurt by them all day long..

i was just making a suggestion..people cause the bot problem and we want LL to get rid of them..whats wrong with saying do it ourselves by cuttin down the big places that make all these other places have to use bots so they can make tier??

we know LL is not gonna do it so who else is left?

Yes, but note that you're using six of them, not one or two, to get that huge difference. And that's just because not all of your competitors are using twelve bots. Yet.

The point is, the bots may work right now--they may even be necessary to compete in the current, stupidly corrupt Traffic market--but they are in no way a strategic advantage. At this stage, packing a parcel with dozens of bots has no barrier to entry other than having some spare connection bandwidth and some idle cycles, and not a whole lot of either.

Users of trafficbots get criticized, but not by me. But they would lose nothing of value if they AND THEIR COMPETITORS did not use them. When LL decides to do something about this, then folks objecting to a change will deserve criticism.

In fact, I expect some sort of Linden policy on this soon, and one that will indeed have the side effect of reducing the fake concurrency numbers. Personally, I do not believe that Traffic (or any other proxy for "popularity" can exist without being gamed, so for this and other reasons, I hope they do away with it as a Search ranking metric altogether. (They will keep it for landowner statistics, I'm sure of that.) But one way or another, the days of trafficbots are numbered. In the two digits.

Well said, Nina.

Oh yes they are. That tiny number of bot-haters are talking about avs that are there to increase the traffic number for search. They even come up with such silly ideas as, it's fine to have 2 or 3 mannequins, because they are probably genuine, but no more. The amount that the traffic numbers are increased intentionally doesn't come into it for them. It's the fact that it is done that they concern themselves with.

The problem is, once enough people start running a 'handful' of bots, you'll have to start running two or more handfuls of bots in order to see the effect that you are currently seeing for the 'handful'.

Artificially inflating traffic in order to game search is a shabby business.
It's not creative, innovative, or anything good. It's essentially a dishonest process.

Apparently LL are going to announce some action on the question soon (Wednesday?).
Here's hoping that they simple remove Traffic as a Search metric. The thing is a farce.

Additionally, it may be that LL have plans - whether long or short term - to create a system by which declared bots are identifiable on Map. There was a comment from Jack Linden in Office Hours about clusters of dots attracting people.

I'm all for having bots to do useful things. They just shouldn't be used to fool either Search, Map or other people that they are live typists.

That kind of thing would certainly help to clean things up.
I can see people carving up their land into keyword microparcels in order to increase the chances of being listed high. Without anything but keywords as search factors, the ranking becomes a lottery.

I think that it would be more sensible significantly increase the space available in Dedcription and index on that only. Filtering to discount the effect of keyword stuffing in content is far from cutting-edge in the Search business.

There are no sensible IBL feeds in SL. Picks buying is just another traffic-gaming scam that has destroyed the meaning of Picks.
Phil has in other threads offered us some self-serving smoke and mirrors to the effect that picks help the search to be "more relevant". If that were actually true, then LL could simply auto-generate a fixed number of IBL pages generated from each parcel content.

A decent Google-type search interface, indexed on expanded parcel content would be least open to gaming.
Any ranking factor that is related to avatars is going to be gamed to hell and back by people more concerned with their own profit than with the effect on society.

That 'tiny number of bot-haters' must be close to 0 in number.

1) I think that I can only remember one person coming up with a 2 or 3 is ok line.
2) I don't think that there are any actual 'bot-haters'. There are certainly people who aregue against the misuse of bots.