How useless is search? Try this.

Try this: Type "hair" into "all search". Do you recognize any of the results?

Here's a not-so-surprising summary of what you'll find:

Three people (Rebecca Vacano, Joe Reid, Mihai Antwerp) control 11 of the top 13 results, and none of them are popular hair sellers.

These are yesterday's results. Rankings are slightly different today, but the same players are at the top.

1
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/rebecca1.gif
name: Platinum
owner: Rebecca Vacano, PlatinumGroup

2
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/jr1.gif
name: RocX
owner: Joe Reid, JR Rentals Epilais

3
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/rebecca2.gif
name: Indulgence
owner: Rebecca Vacano, Indulgence Sim Group

4
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/rebecca3.gif
name: Escala
owner: Rebecca Vacano, no group

5
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/grendal1.gif
name: Starlight
owner: Grendal Mauvaise, HEAVEN & HELL CLUB

6
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/jr2.gif
name: RocX
owner: Joe Reid, JR Rentals Epilais

7
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/jr3.gif
name: RocX (not labeled as such)
owner: Joe Reid, JR Rentals Epilais

8
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/elan1.gif
name: Bad@zz (not labeled as such)
owner: Mihai Antwerp, Elan Rentals Guksu (Elanthius says this isn't him; it's just a renter)

9
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/elan2.gif
name: Bad@zz
owner: Mihai Antwerp, Elan Rentals Guksu

10
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/kira1.gif
name: Flawless
owner: Kira Paderborn, no group

11
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/elan3.gif
name: Bad@zz
owner: Mihai Antwerp, Elan Rentals Guksu

12
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/elan4.gif
name: Bad@zz (not labeled as such)
owner: Mihai Antwerp, Elan Rentals Guksu

13
image: http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/elan5.gif
name: Bad@zz
owner: Mihai Antwerp, Elan Rentals Guksu

Do those look like useful results? At least Rebecca has a substantial fashion offering, but have year heard of her stores? Do they ever come up in "your favorite hair stores" threads?

How about Mihai Antwerp's store, Bad@zz. Please visit and tell me if that deserves to hold 5 of the top 13 places in search for hair. That's right, it's a furniture and club store, with 8 female and 3 male hair styles nowhere near the landing point.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Guksu/227/68/427

If you want SL to succeed, is this really what you want getting in the way of finding hair?

Rounding out the top 30 we have:

14 unknown name, owned by Dominus Skye
15 Zero Style
16 Analog Dog
17 Beach Life
18 Adam n Eve
19 PXL Creations
21 Vixen
22 Soul
23 Platinum Africa, also owned by Rebecca Vacano
24 Golden Sands
25 Calla
26 Sweet Faces
27 Nitro
28 Armidi
29 MADesigns
30 Amity Island Freebies

That's right, the first of the places that are actually popular start at position 15.

Here's what the top three pages of "hair" search looked like yesterday:

http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/page1.gif
http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/page2.gif
http://vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/search/page3.gif

Note that the classifieds aren't very useful, either. Why is it that furniture and prefabs figure so prominently in any search?

Yesterday I asked for favorite hair stores:

/327/1e/330243/1.html

Where does your favorite hair store show up in search?

Here are some other hair threads. Seems the favorites are long-standing. And damned hard to find!

Vintage Hair
/327/31/319338/1.html

Favorite Hair Places
/327/ac/305425/1.html

Where are the best mens hair stores?
/327/ba/303918/1.html

Hair Stores with more 'realistic' textures
/327/2e/303184/1.html

Best hair in sl - Whats your pick?
http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=79145

Who sells the best female hair?
/327/49/238146/1.html

Way to go Anya!

Thanks as usual for the leg work!

In response to that, I give you this map screenshot that I took back in January. I have little reason to doubt that anything has changed much since then:

I'm not quite replicating these results, but close enough. Certainly results on the first page are all quite useless.

But for *utter* futility, try searching for "hair" on the Places tab. This despite traffic-gaming having been banned for three and a half months now. I hope the traffic apologists are proud of their victory.

Things changed a lot there with the traffic, but only _very_ recently. That was one of the largest camping, and later bot, sims for a few years running, and I'd expect it to take a long while for the residual links to fade out. A _lot_ of picks were accumulated over that time.

Thanks for checking. I'm getting the same top 13, but in a slightly different order. That is, the same three people have the same number of top spots.

Think it through, folks. Do you think you'd get something useful if you typed "shirts" into Google? Given just the word "hair", how could the search engine possibly know which ones you'd want to see first?

Popularity? What you might mean by popularity is "many people like it", but how could LL possibly measure that? Traffic isn't popularity, it's marketing or SEO. Making lots of sales to lots of different people isn't popularity or quality, it's marketing or low prices.

Even so, usually people want hair that's distinctive, which means going to places that aren't popular. Or you're looking for particular style - long, short, curly, flip, elegant, casual, conservative, whatever. There's no way for the engine to figure that out from "hair". Or you want hair that looks good to you - which has nothing to do with whether or not it looks good to other people.

If you're going to search for things at all, try to be specific. A simple change like searching for "hair women's" gives me Adam & Eve, Calla, Adored, and Sirena at the top. It doesn't always help as dramatically as this, but it's often worth trying.

But get out of the mindset that Search has to be the answer to everything. There are some things for which it will never be useful. The way to find hair is to read reviews, blogs, etc., not through generic searches.

for more search fun:

use viewer 1.23, go to search-places, mark ONLY "pg" and enter furniture.
first hit: neva naughty.
so much for "PG".

Oh come on. Don't be so mean. That's not an "Elanthius Flagstaff" result that's just one of my renters. Do you blame Anshe Chung when one of her residents does some crappy search thing?

All 10 hits on the first page are actually places that sell shirts. Tee-shirts, to be precise, but there's not one furniture store on the first page.

The group was founded by you. All roles are employees of the store, except "Land Rental", and that person is heavily involved in Ninja land rentals. One could hardly be faulted for thinking it's an alt of yours.

Are you saying it's not your store? Do you have a rental group set up for each sim?

Edit: I've edited in your renter's name in the original post

You do have a nice full head of hair. I figured somehow search just knew that.

Elan does a bunch of group juggling for his tier rental business.

And also for conventional mainland parcel rentals. But lets not confuse the issue with facts... We'll just let the OP go on thinking she has unearthed a secret search conspiracy.

Is it technically a secret conspiracy when it's all out in the open?

You mean I don't get to catch Elan in an ugly search scam? Aw, shucks! I've edited his renter's name into the OP.

Search is messed up for a lot of things.

To fix it, they need to do what web search engines started doing IN THE LATE 1990s...
- stop basing results on keywords.

You can base them instead on content and context inquiries. Web search engines have known how to do this for a decade, I'm sure anyone in computer science school right now could write the engine as a second or third semester upper division class project...

You look at the content connected to the entry, and the context around it, and add a small team of humans to examine random samples of the results and rank them - using that data to adjust those results and ones similar to them up or down or onto / off of certain search terms.

I no longer use SL search for buying anything. I use SLX and buy from there or find the item and then locate it inworld afterward.
This is probably just what the Lindens want and maybe why they don't care much about the accuracy of the SL search tools.

Ah, well, that's where the problem comes in.

Recently, I had used "Search >> All" tab to search for a certain skin style which led me to a store near the top of the search results whose owner not only had the skin style name in keywords, but had a prim farm buried in the ground far under the sky-store with each prim named with one or more of the search results.

I never did find the actual item that I had used Search for, but I did find a whole bunch of nice plywood prim boxes when I looked at the x/y/z location given by Search.

-Dab

SLX has its own problems, including results almost as irrelevant as in-world search, but most significantly, the volume of results is a problem. I believe the only solution is to have a human in the mix to rank things, but there's no way the idealists at LL will ever do that. That someone's ten-minute products and redundant reseller crap can get in the way of people finding truly good-quality stuff is a problem, not a feature, but there's too much touchy-feelgood in SL and at LL for anyone to dare say some people's products shouldn't receive any attention. Instead, we drown in a sea of crap. Everyone gets a pat on the head.



Two problems there. One, finding things on SLX doesn't get any easier as more things are added. Two, if SLX becomes the primary way of finding things, it will receive the primary attention of the search gamers.

Please visit Bad@zz. Take a look around when you get there:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Guksu/227/68/427

Now tell me, does it do Second Life any good that this mediocre furniture store appears *five times* in search (for "hair" before any of these places:

Jolie Femme
ETD
Sirena
Bewitched
Detour
Shop Seu
Deviant Kitties
Gritty Kitty
Gurl 6
Magika
Refuge
Junwave
Tukinowaguna
Curious Kitties
Panache
Artilleri
Damselfly
69
Laqroki
Analog Dog
Maitreya
Cake
Zero Style
Tami Mcoy
Sparkle Skye
Calla
Lelutka
Naughty Designs
Truth
Goldilocks

I see a lot of kitties in that list!

People used to find great amusement at my walking a cat on a leash. Now I've seen a ferret on a leash. I am humbled

Anya, what results do you get when you search Places, instead of All?

I never use All, unless the Places tab comes up empty.