Live modeling is cheating?

There's certainly a great deal of room for improvement in search results, and those are certainly good ideas.

One reason I already prefer the All search rather than Places search is that I can click on an individual listings, which will bring up a list of items for sale on that parcel. It's not perfect, especially for malls, but it is useful. If I see exactly what I want in the listing, I can then use the coordinates to find it quickly, without having to wait for the entire store to rez.

That's an excellent way of looking at it, Kidd, and I agree with with your thinking. Unfortuantely, LL have picked a really bad way of implementing it and, because of that, it's safe to have bots in the store but not to have real people who can earn a little money, simply because the owner cannot check the registration status of any employees. Ironic, huh.

LOL I got a warning for suspension for gaming traffic and i have 1 lowsy service bot on my land.. But they allow Phatland to have 20 model bots and game the traffic to death.. Pretty damn funny.. It really amazes me how lame LL can be half the time.. Allow others to skirt the rules while harassing a person over 1 silly bot lol I even registered the stupid thing as a scripted agent and still got harassed for gaming..

Contrary me.............and I don't really mean to be that way. I agree getting rid of traffic counts would also get rid of the problem of gaming that system........no system, nothing to game. But, how would you ever do that and have a search feature at all that would give the search any inkling at all about relevance to whatever it is we are searching for? If you leave it entirely to key words you get a completely erroneous list of places based on what you are looking for. For example, a search I made just last night for fairie avatars...........I get listings for shop rentals, prefab homes, shoes, AO's, furries, land purchases, scripting (and so on and so on.........). The only indication at all is to glance at traffic to see if maybe (important word here) the place might have what I'm searching for. My thinking is that if others are, or have, searched for the same item then the numbers would give me a clue if it's possibly worth my tping in............if does not work 100% of the time, of course, but it does give me something to go on besides the key words which are obviously put in by the shop owners/vendors to get listed in as many places as possible (regardless of the relevance).

I don't know how you fix that. I don't see setting avatars and bots to scripted agents or anything to exclude them from traffic count would solve much at all. We'll still get the same false listings that we will have to guess at for relevancy.......only it will be smaller numbers to work with (which is not a bad thing I suppose). It's just seems a complete waste of time to me plus another something for a shop owner to have to worry about and anyone trying to earn a "living" in SL to have to do..............to freaking complicated.

Last night I also went to an event. The place has a pretty good traffic count however it's just a club like so many others with a DJ, contest board, some rentals nearby, maybe a few shops............the reason their traffic numbers are where they are is that they have events almost daily (sometimes 2 or 3). And, at least, 3/4 of the avatars there are "employees" or friends/alts of employees. Are you going to find a way to exclude that too? I mean that's "gaming" the system too.........perhaps more so than "live models".

That's my problem with this whole mess............and, yeah I know, I'm not offering any solutions. I simply don't know how you can solve it.........nothing anyone has said yet really fixes a thing. It only makes it more difficult on the honest people trying to make tier or even a little extra real cash for themselves.

Was your bot registered as a scripted agent? Are those 20 model bots registered? If they are registered and yours wasn't, then LL got it the right way round.

If you put 4 bots up and register them all, then they'll still count for traffic. But I'm only saying that to tell you what you mustn't do

Hello, Miss Contrary

The solution is the way they already did it in an RC, and they way they planned to do it in their roadmap for search. Replace the results in the Places tab with places results from the GSA. The GSA system produces much more relevant results than than the Places tab currently does anyway.

yes as i sad mine is regged.. has been since the day they put it up. Im not a gamer and could care less about losing traffic over 1 stupid bot..
My traffic has been and always will be 100% true
And even tho regged they still have not got the bots excluded from traffic.. They just have a silly website page that is still worthless to the traffic count

It was registered? I missed that bit. Maybe it was superfluous to the store - just standing doing nothing at all? Even so, just one bot - technically correct if it was doing nothing beneficial, but nit-picking.

It is highly doubtful that that person is sitting there at their computer for x hours in a day staring at an avatar that is just sitting there wearing and outfit while on a stand.

If they are, I suggest psychiatric help.

If they are not, they can register it as a scripted agent, and move on with a second account used for actually doing things.

Disagree...they might be keeping an eye on the store for the boss.

On the other hand traffic is a useful metric when it comes to looking for social places.

If a place's description seems good but its traffic is 100 then it's not worth visiting since you're not going to find anyone there. On the other hand if you're looking for a sandbox to build in peace it's probably going to be perfect.

The problem isn't so much with traffic but rather that it's not tailored to each different kind of listing.

One good way of ranking could be linking the search term to what you do after you arrive: ie if you searched for "couch" and tp over and end up buying a couch then that result would gain relevance; if on the other hand you tp away without buying anything then it looses relevance. If you end up buying a "desk" then it would gain relevance for "couch" but that's not a big deal since on average things will settle down since it'll result in a higher number of people tp'ing over after also searching for "couch" and not buying anything which would even things out.

Which was manipulated/gamed as soon as it was introduced as well.

I know you prefer the term "optimized my ranking" but it comes down to essentially the same thing: you wanted to rank higher and you did.

Any ranking that can be influenced by the parcel owner is inherently flawed (and please don't bring up comparisons between Google and the web because they're apples and oranges).

Kitty and I may be on the same page here. Seems the problem arises because counting traffic without any qualifiers makes the system both useless AND easy to game. How hard would it be to set up a system where for any single search session to log the searched item then compare it to a purchased item? Or even if or not the avi created a landmark (or accepted a landmark) after arriving? I don't see where time spent there is a good indicator of anything..........I often spend more time than I want somewhere simply looking for what is that I'm searching for.

To me that seems a better way to set rankings for any place......raw numbers just don't mean squat without some relevance. I'm certainly no programer but dammit I know there are some very smart people working for LL.......surely they can come up with something besides imposing restrictions that don't solve the problem. It might serve to give the impression of "solving" the problem but even I can see that is just tossing out a token to satisfy the masses.

i can't find crap on that places search anyways..
it's still on one word searches and gamed to death..

do a lot of you still use it?

if i want to use it i get the full name from the all search and then paste it in places just to get a look at the map..

they could save me a lot of trouble if they just put the ability to see the map from the all search so i can forget places search altogether.

It's good for social places though.

Some terms will be ambiguous but most would probably fall squarely into one category or another so if you knew that searching for "live music" gave you a result that was essentially ordered by "people who also searched for 'live music' and stayed a - relatively - long time" then you'd have a "group relevant" result.

The problem is that LL doesn't seem very interested in custom solutions but would rather buy a third party ready-made square peg and then just keep slamming it against the round hole until it fits more or less (usually less).

I use "Places" pretty much exclusively (then again I only ever search for social places or places I already know - the latter being faster than digging up the landmark ).

All search is just too unwieldy (if you could open each result in a new tab it might be bearable but the constant click, wait, back, wait, move mouse to the next listing, click, wait drives me insane) and search.secondlife.com only lists PG places which isn't very useful either even though it's significantly faster.

The browser still has some serious bugs as well; as well as search in general (places I absolutely know exist end up missing from All or won't show the actual listing page or the page is missing altogether).

And I just want "Show on Map" .

Of course. That's the nature of search engines, and there's nothing 'gaming' about optimising. As you know, web search engines suggest doing it. But then it entered the realms of spam with the GSA and, as long as some people do it successfully, others, including me, will also do it or fade away, although I haven't even looked at it for many months now. That's the nature of such things.