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How useless is search? Try this.

Anya Ristow
Vengeance Studio
Join date: 21 Sep 2006
Posts: 1,243
07-16-2009 17:43
From: Lindal Kidd
Anya, what results do you get when you search Places, instead of All?


You're kidding, right? No pun intended :)

Places is sorted by traffic. It's a who's-who of SL hucksterism. When I search for "hair" in the "places" tab I get freebies, money this, money that, freebies, clubs, freebies, and of course, furniture.

Think of all the subject lines you might expect in your mail box if LL were to open up your email address for spammers. That's "places" search.

But there's also Damselfly at position 49, Truth at 51, Gurl6 at 75, Calla at 91.

Now, Damselfy's showing in the traffic ranking looks suspiciously high, so let's go take a look...

Five blue dialogs to discard. TOmmy Fairplay's 'Greeter' needs to be ignored, and four landmarks need to be discarded:

[17:17] You decline 'Damselfly Hair Salon, Damselfly Hair Salon (145, 237, 25)' ... from Damselfly Greeter.
[17:17] You decline 'Welcome to DragonFly Oasis' ... from Damselfly Greeter.
[17:17] You decline 'DFO,DragonFly Designs,DamselFly , DragonFly Oasis (239, 127, 25' ... from Damselfly Greeter.
[17:17] You decline 'Sex-O-Matic Furniture Store NE Entrance' ... from Damselfly Greeter.

And...this place looks familiar. Look what I found in my bot hunting days:

http://greendots.typepad.com/green_dots/2008/08/sex-o-matic.html

They've expanded to three sims. They seem to have gotten rid of the traffic bots, but when I was bot hunting I suspected they were also using shopping bots. Maybe that should be investigated.
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Snickers Snook
Odd Princess - Trout 7.3
Join date: 17 Apr 2007
Posts: 746
07-16-2009 18:30
Maybe they all spell it "fhairniture"?
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Anya Ristow
Vengeance Studio
Join date: 21 Sep 2006
Posts: 1,243
07-16-2009 20:33
From: Viktoria Dovgal
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...


I've seen a couple more instances of bot farms dumping their bots very recently. It might account for the recent drop in concurrency. Concurrency dropped after the ban was announced but crept back up, but now it's going down again. Maybe LL has started enforcing the ban. If so, they've only scratched the surface.
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Viktoria Dovgal
Join date: 29 Jul 2007
Posts: 3,593
07-16-2009 21:12
Yeah, after the other thread that cropped up about bots this week, I got curious and peeked into a couple of other warnings that were made public. Those places got blacked out from search too, temporarily. That must be LL's new way to get their attention =)
Ann Otoole
Registered User
Join date: 22 May 2007
Posts: 867
08-25-2009 05:17
LL did something to search 2 weeks ago and it clearly favors keyword spammers now.
I can't recommend anyone out spam them even if it looks like that is what LL wants. That would be "inciting" or something like that.

Oh don't forget classified ads...

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12395

Your classified ad dollars are hardly at work.

mmmmm spam.. with bot salad.
Clarissa Lowell
Gone. G'bye.
Join date: 10 Apr 2006
Posts: 3,020
08-25-2009 06:40
What if places were sorted by rating instead - and those ratings were chosen by LL and not known to anyone?
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Lindal Kidd
Dances With Noobs
Join date: 26 Jun 2007
Posts: 8,371
08-25-2009 08:45
From: Clarissa Lowell
What if places were sorted by rating instead - and those ratings were chosen by LL and not known to anyone?


FIC! FIC! FIC! :eek:
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Lindal Kidd
Sony Swords
Linux Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Join date: 17 Jan 2009
Posts: 176
08-25-2009 09:06
From: Clarissa Lowell
What if places were sorted by rating instead - and those ratings were chosen by LL and not known to anyone?


I think you are smart!
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