How LL could make bots irrelevant

i really wish they would add a map feature to the search all like the rest of them..

Well I am a merchant and I really would not know why merchants would be against it. Let's say that merchants running traffic bots or camping are against it. Even then, I think they are the minority. Most businesses do not rely on bots, so they would benefit from the ticking box.

There is another reason I would not support it, and that is because I think traffic has no place in search. Remove places search and we are done. Most people will forget ticking the box anyway probably, and it makes things only more complicated.

The best part is that consumers already have a lot of power, they often just do not realize it. Providing good information about the power of Search All would make a difference. Educate people how to use Search All.

True, how many people use boolean operators or put their search terms in speech marks?

If places that used camping and bots to inflate Traffic were purely in the business of running camping pads or exhibiting bots, there wouln't be an issue of cheating.



I don't recall anyone asserting popular=awsome in all of these threads.

"Poundland is a popular store for people to shop at, everything costing a quid and all that"
OK, so it's popular for that reason.
It's not popular because they pay people to hang around, or because they have the attic ful of zombies.
This is a none-too-sublte distinction that you seem determined to ignore over all thesse threads.

That's not true at all.

Bots don't need to be used for camping or traffic gaming. For instance, AI research in virtual worlds typically utilizes bots. Are we going to ban academic research in this field? Even in the commercial sphere there are bots being developed for legitimate reasons (i.e. tour guides for sims). I saw a really awesome AI tour guide video on youtube the other day. A bot guide led the player around the sim and explained the various landmarks that they stopped at. It would respond to simple questions and keywords and try to give help.

I wish people would stop screaming for a ban on bots.

I can't speak for Qie but, if LL only bans traffic manipulation but keeps the traffic rankings, it will definitely fail. The manipulations may not be as obvious as they are now, but they will exist in quantity and users will be worse off for them because of lag. Also, it won't produce the desired effect in the results, even if manipulation ended. Sling's prison example shows why.

I mentioned in a recent thread how, without any form of traffic manipulation, I would have a 6840 traffic points start on other furniture stores, and 6840 is a *lot* more than any furniture store gets in a day from customer-type traffic. And there you have a perfect example of how banning traffic manipulation, and yet keeping the traffic rankings, won't work. I'd begin with a huge start on the others because of my models, but my lead wouldn't be maintained for long as others would convert their bots to do similar things - right where the people are - and add to the lag.

With a bit of luck, LL has the will to do something sensible rather than doing something just to shut the whiners up, but I'm not holding my breath on that.

If they advertise camping they're not cheating, people go there to camp. If there are other things on the parcel then so be it. Some people split parcels into smaller ones, others don't. The mall next to a sex club will have high traffic if the mall is on the same parcel as the sex club, it doesn't mean the mall is any good, but the traffic count will be.





Places that pay people to hang around are popular. People do go to them, people do see a use in them. This is the point you ignore, it doesn't matter what attracts people to a parcel, if you just want to talk about popularity of a parcel, if people are attracted it's popular.

If poundland paid people to hang around it would have even more people in its store.

So you discovered some of the secrets yourself. That doesn't make them not secrets.



It is detectable by a visiting Linden and if the punishment is devastating enough you would not risk it. This is just like RL, where enforcement is notoriously weak, but fear fills in.



Yes it can; if there are optimizations that can legitimately be done by everyone, why not just treat every parcel as if it had performed them?



Every moment of effort put into ranking is a moment not put into actually creating content, so I'm not sure what the link there is.



Right, but what happens when the first page is taken up by the corporations who have 20 full time staff on search optimization, or who know secrets that it takes 5 years of analysis to find?

The only solution is to abolish pages, of introduce a counteracting force; discounting items lower in search would be one example, or charging for the tp to higher ranked locations.

The idea of 3 camping slots per sim is rubbish (dunno who suggested it). The reason is so obvious that I hesitate to say why but just in case...

Who decides which parcel owner can use the slots? The rest follows from there.

It's not a suggestion, it's a guess as to what LL might do. I took my cue from the ad farm guidelines in which they said no more than one ad per sim and no more than 50 per person. Everyone said that would fail too, "Oh there'll be groups with many members, oh someone will just create tons of alts to use for their ads, oh someone will buy up 16s and rent them out to ad farmers." Well guess what none of that happened because ad farmers are scared of being banned and losing all their investment. LL used a common sense approach and didn't let people screw around with these fake work arounds and now ad towers are extremely rare and massive ad networks are totally gone.

I still think they will implement a rule like this, not this exact rule but something like it. When I stated it though I probably should have added the corollory that it was also per parcel. So I meant 3 camping sites per location. Please don't bother to argue with me about what a terrible idea this is because it's not my idea of a good plan it's only my idea of something that is both likely to happen and probably effective. If you really must disagree with something, and it appears many of you must then disagree over whether it is likely to be implemented or not.

My God, you're right! Because of course any store that is popular today and has lots of customers can't possibly ever become less popular any time in the future.

Elanthius could be onto something, no more than three camping pads per sim per group or land owner, which is similar to how they did the advert policy, they could even limit it to one and no more than 50 across the grid.

Wrong, I did put effort in optimizing my search result. Just a part of doing business, in the real worlds and in the virtual world.


Wrong because the rules are not clear. As I mentioned before, what about lucky chairs, zyngo games, game devices, money chairs/trees? I have an avatar standing 24/7 at my money chairs, probably scripted for when his first letter comes up. You can only enforce when you set rules.


This remark shows little understanding of what is needed to optimize for search. Should some magical wizard do your optimization or what the heck do you mean here??


Time needed for boxing the created content for sales is not put in creating actual content either. Neither is time put into marketing. Business is more then creating the stuff, its about selling it as well.


You know what the fun part is? Many of those big names could not care less about search results. They are found by brand name anyway. And as I stated I found how to optimize without 20 full time staff members. And without 5 years analysis. So what ARE we talking about? What secrets?

As stated again and again, Search all does function quite well as long as people put effort in being found. But too many people create some items and sit back whining they do not have sales. There is a perfect sticky how to be found in search, but apparently they do not research their options. So your only solution might be the one you mention, my solution is much simpler: use the information that is available and move on.

My mistake. I thought someone had made the suggestion. I agree that LL may do something along those lines, so I won't argue with you about it

uhm, never open sourced the viewer code? Oops, too late!

I can't say that I understand that unless it's sarcasm. If it is, the reason I would have that amount of head start is because of my 6 unmanned store models, which (most) other furniture stores don't use - yet. It's not a measure of my store's customer-type traffic.

And in doing so you found a secret. That doesn't mean that it's not a secret. Are you going to tell everyone what you found? I expect not. That's fine, you don't have to, but that means you're keeping it from others, which means it's a secret.



Not at all. Almost all governments use a strategy of vague laws + devastating punishments for dealing with offenses that don't have clear boundaries.



Well, if a parcel would rank high by, say, being split into several parcels, then treat every parcel as being split in that way. If it would rank high by having X number of picking alts, then treat it as having that many. If it would rank high by having some keyword or other in the title, treat it as if the keyword was there.



Marketing is a symptom of a broken free market. In SL this is not a law of nature.



Well, the ones you don't know yet, of course. I don't know them either - but do you think that the firms charging US$10,000 to get business websites onto the first page of the real Google are just doing things you can read on a public forum? Do you think that after their first 10 customers, they say "oh, sorry, we already optimized 10 people so they'll fill the front page and we can't possibly do anything more for you, here's your money back?" Of course not. There are layers and layers of secrets to find.



But what do you do when that information no longer gets you a visible ranking?

Uh, this doesn't really make sense. If the issue is gaming the system, you can't have the majority being the gamers or it IS the system. My experience is that the majority of merchants do not use bots. Hell, most places I go have no one else or maybe one other avatar on the sim. Most merchants do little more than work on their text blurb and list items for search. That would mean that they would have little reason to not support taking traffic out of the mix. When you are in the single or low double digits of traffic, you have no reason to be against this - and that would be the majority of merchants from what I see. Lately, even most of the gathering places.

Well, according to the other thread, they could compensate for the bots with the kiddies - I don't know if those are yet counted in their Resident figures or not.

Most people seem to think that LL finds the real residents irrelevant. Doesn't that make bots irrelevant as well?

Now if we had Linden bots on the grid, we would have an issue. Relevant bots. Merryman bots? Not so relevant.

Now there are lots of bots, so maybe its a mammoth problem. But not a relephant one.

We do have Linden bots on the grid. Those avs with the Tester surname are Linden bots - so I understand.

Then perhaps, as Humphrey Bogart said when the burro died, Huston, we have a problem...

I woke up this morning find to an XStreetSL mailshot giggling at me.
LL has borged XStreetSL.

Pretty neat!
When they integrate it fully, it will be the in-world retail search platform.
Plus they get a cut of the transactions if people don't want to TP to the store.

I wonder if an XStreetSL/SLExchange integrated into the viewer could lead to a natural wasting away of the importance of Traffic. Are LL hoping for this so that they don't have to police the issue except in extreme cases?
OR
Would nothing change - due to the low cost of running bots?

Would people think to search for a club on XSTreetSL??
They would if it were presented in the right way in the viewer Search.

Feel free to call it a secret. In that case anything that can be found by simply analyzing available data, can be called a secret. For me, it is simply researching data. Nothing I found was secret, I just researched competing businesses, and decided what would be the best way to get a better result.


Well I do not know under what government you live, but in my country you have to break a clear law to get punished. Nothing vague in that.


It is no secret that the most important ranking factors are the parcel name and description. So how the hell should the system pretend a keyword in the title? Which keyword? How should any system pretend a parcel description being there? This does not make any sense at all Yumi. While it is so simple, the parcel owner decides about the parcel name and description.


Here I seem to be loosing you completely. In every market where you want to sell products, you will have to market them some way or the other. Otherwise no one even knows you exist.


Let me give you a nice example. The company we work for wanted to be first in Google for certain keywords. In a big, competitive market. We are not a big company, but took some time to research the best way to get there. And guess what: we got that first place. Apart from the payed links, there is no way to get to #1 with secrets. The fact that some companies charge $10.000 to get you on the first page, just means they gathered the knowledge, and for some people it is easier to hire that knowledge then to find things out themselves. My job as consultant would not even exist if everybody did their own research
My invested time led to results. The fact others do not take that time cannot be written off on the search engine. Neither on some conspiracy theory. It is not my business, but if someone would pay me enough I would research their competition and come up with an advice to get them on the first page as well. That is what those $10.000 are all about.


Do more research. Getting on that first page is one thing, staying there means you have to keep watching the competition. Again, that is what business is about. Not just create things, but also spend time in making sure they get to the customer.

Don't hold your breath for that to happen.