PPRS (I need my resident database for paid locations)

Post #64, Sling. Read post #64. You always fall into a hole in these discussions. Read post #64 - it shows you where you always go wrong.

@Sling: simply read the links already posted. LL told us to find ways to get those picks. They do not need to mention all ways to gather them, do they? Whether I start making as many friends as possible, or pay the next 100 avatars I am meeting 100 linden, does not make a difference, they are both valid ways to get those picks. Whether they take the pick for the 100 linden or because they find me a nice dude, is irrevelant. Both have nothing to do with the quality of my store. And no one ever said that they have to, either.

That might be the most important thing in this discussion: No one ever defined what picks should be used for. They can be used for the following (and probably more):
- Show people what places you like.
- Show people how much you love your friends/family/whatever.
- List your roleplaying limits.
- List parcels that pay you.

None of those is more valid then the other. YOU might prefer the first I listed, but many profiles I have seen use one of the other (especially the second).

Again: LL told us to find ways to collect picks for our stores. They did not tell us to gather bots or microparcels. They told us clearly even.

The thing is, I DO agree with you that the combination of using picks in search, and telling people to gather as many as possible, was not the smartest thing to do. But they did it anyway, so why point the finger at those why followed the advice? Wouldn't it be smarter to conclude the advice wasn't the smartest of all?

And Sling... it is rather childish way to respond, the way you did (the format in which you did...).

No. Post #64 just has you, as usual, defying logic. It's your party trick in these sorts of threads. That's all it shows.

You persist in ignoring the fact that a Pick given solely on the basis of a reward works completely against the reason for using Picks as a weighting factor in a Search for which the searcher, and not the merchant, is intended to be the main beneficiary.

Sling. Post #64 says it all. *You've* decided what's ok and what's not ok. It's *you* Sling. You don't have anything from LL to back you up. It's just you. You always do it. The silly thing is that you post the stuff too.

Now that's an interesting comment.

Why do you think that was not the smartest thing to do?
Do you think that there was some undesirable outcome? What was that?

Btw, Sling. You didn't answer my question from post #67, and I'd like you to. Here it is again...

Would you like to hazard a guess as to why LL set Picks as a Search ranking factor? You should know the answer because you were told a long time ago but you may have invented other reasons.

To show you that I do answer questions asked to me, I will answer this

Search should be about relevance. That is the biggest weakness of SL Search: there hardly are any ways to measure relevance. We will have to do with the tools provided to us though. Most stores working on a good ranking, provide relevant content for the keyword they are trying to rank for, but that has nothing to do with picks. Picks are in fact irrelevant. Inbound links are irrelevant, as this is not the WWW.

LL chose the Google Appliance, for which inbound links are important. So they published the fact that picks are incoming links, and that to rank high, we should gather incoming links i.e. picks. Which of course in SL has nothing to do with relevance: I can create an html page based on sexbeds for example, gather 100 picks, and rank well. Yet I can do that without selling a single sexbed. The "cheating" would in this case be the use of the keyword sexbeds to rank for, without selling those.

What might be wiser (and totally off topic) is provide us with better ways to compose that html page, and punish using false keywords. That way business owners can focus on optimize their html page to be as relevant as possible for the keywords they are aiming for.

Ranking in Search will always be a matter of knowledge and hard work though.

Now that I tried answering you, can you answer this:

Why, if LL explicitly told us to get those picks from people, why do you find it wrong when we actually do so? Why is it the people actually following LL advice are wrong? I mean I understand why you would prefer to see picks used different, but it seems LL does not agree with you.

That's really funny.
Post #67.
I asked that precise question in Post#66, which due to the sheer excellence of the Forum software, appeared directly above Post #67.
I asked it of someone else, and am not particularly concerned about a direct answer. It was blindingly obviously a rhetorical question.

However, as I know your style of old, I'll save us all a fewe pages of posts by responding directly, even though it is already abundantly clear why LL would use Picks as a Search ranking factor.

Profile Picks were a ready made IBL for the GSA.
Profile Picks were in general a vote by the avatar for a parcel. This was not 100% the case, but the nature of Picks in a Profile made it nearly so.

Of course, the moment people started systematically buying Picks from any avatar, then that reasoning went out the door.




Really?
Remind us all.

It's never that great steaming pile of horse-poo about the GSA *needing* IBLs, is it?

this may not fair well, when Taintee applies for Marketing Director.

You are correct. I actually expected you to come up with your own imagined reasons, but you got it right. Well done.

It's not "really funny" in the way you meant. If you read post #67, you'd see that I asked you the question *because* you asked it to Marcel. I even copied and pasted your question.

Before the GSA was even bought, a *very* significant percentage of Picks were nothing to do with the places where they were taken. I could argue that, since the GSA was introduced, that percentage has become lower and, therefore, Picks are more useful for the GSA than they were.

We've been through all that before, Sling, so you should know better than to come up with statements like that. Without using IBLs as a ranking factor, the GSA results wouldn't be anywhere near as good as they are with them. That's the reason why all the major search engines changed from content-driven to IBLs-driven methods after Google showed them how much better the results are because of it. I thought you knew all this, anyway - I taught it to you ages you. You must have a bad memory, I suppose.

Even though all that is true, the GSA system itself is highly unsuited to the SL system. It's like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Although Picks as IBLs are better than no IBLs, they are not really suitable for that purpose.

Were profile picks in general a vote by the avatar for a parcel? Or would you want them to be? Hey, I can understand the latter, I even agree that it would serve very well for that.

Now take a look at a few dozen profiles, and you see it is not true, and it was not true before the change in search. Many people simply use it as an extension for the small textbox on the first page of the profile: Who are my friends (and do not mess with them!), what are my interests, where is my home, what are my RP interests, and of course: what store/club/mall does one of my friends have. Again, I understand what you would like them to be, thoser picks, but they are not.

This is the crux of the search issue, returning relevant results. That's what a search engine needs to do. If the search engine is returning irrelevant results, due to picks, traffic or keywords then there's a problem with search.

Far and away the biggest problem I see with search in SL is the keyword issue.

I'll second that.

On Picks as an indication of worth
==========================



“Now take a look at a few dozen profiles”
I can do far better than “a few dozen”.
I read profiles all the time. Anywhere I land, I’m looking at profiles. I’ve been doing that since I started in SL in January ’07. I’ve been through thousands of profiles. Those profiles have been picked up in sims catering to just about any activity you care to imagine. My curiosity is all-consuming. I drink deeply of SL.
I’ve found wonderful places via the picks of others. When visiting such places, I find myself thinking “How would I have found this Place in Search?”
Across the many thousands of profiles I’ve seen, the use of Picks as a ‘vote’ for places is by far the most common use.

I do see profiles with “This is my sis”-type picks. It’s always blindingly obvious (to a human reader) that this is an extension of the persons profile and not a vote for the location in the Pick.
So would these “sis” picks that I’ve seen over the years have some noticeable influence if included in an automated system that could not tell the difference between a “sis” and a place pick?
No they wouldn’t. Not in my years of looking at them.
Residential and RP locations are very common.
A location named “No Parcel” is very common. That is – the place is gone but the “sis” lives on.
*To have an effect on Search ranking, the places referenced in “sis” picks would have to be flagged for Search.*

The nature of a “sis” pick is that it tends to be set up in a place where the avatar is spending quality time. There may be people who land into a random store and suddenly decide to drop everything and set up a pick for their “sis”. I haven’t seen much evidence of this in my years of spot checks on that sort of pick.


Relevance
========


What is this Holy Grail of “Relevance” – precisely – in terms of SL?
Imagine a Search in which ranking is done by an automated evaluation of the content of the parcel HTML pages.
Try this:
- Set up three parcels as precise clones.
- Flag them for Search
All three will be equally “relevant”
Without changing anything that an avatar can detect or that affects their experience of the parcels
- Super-optimise parcel.A for Search
- Moderately optimise Parcel.B for Search
- Leave Parcel.C as is.

Parcel.A is now magically “more Relevant” than is parcel.B, which is in turn “more Relevant” than parcel.C
Nothing has changed for the avatar. The parcels to them are precise clones of each other. Parcel.A in no way gives them anything than does parcel.C does not.

Now
- Revert the position to where the parcel are identical in all respects, including optimisation. All three parcels are again equally “Relevant”.
- give each of the parcels to someone who will change and manage the parcel according to their own taste, *but* with the limitation that the keywords and product types can not be changed. The physical design of the place can change. The quality and presentation of the offerings can change, but *nothing* that affects the technical analysis of the HTML page by the search indexing can change.

Parcel.A is left unchanged
Parcel.B is tarted up a bit
Parcel.C is transformed into an exciting place with superior offerings at great prices.

What changes in Search?
- Nothing.
- All three parcels are equally “Relevant”


Who is intended to benefit from Search?
- The searcher, I would say.
Which of the three parcels would a searcher be most delighted with?
- Parcel.C, I would say.
How does the Search help the searcher to get delighted?
- It doesn’t, other than listing parcel.C somewhere in the results.

Now
Super-optimise the dull low-quality parcel.A for search.
- Suddenly, it’s vastly more “Relevant” than the vastly superior parcel.C
- Parcel.A gets ranked way higher. Does anyone dispute that higher ranking influences higher sales?
- How does this benefit the searcher?


In a Search based solely on the HTLM page for a parcel, ranking in Search will always be a matter of knowledge (of search optimisation) and hard work (at search optimisation) though. Fixed!

That sort of search ranking is primarily of benefit to those parcel owners who have very specific skills that are unrelated to the content and quality of the parcel..
In that sort of Search, assuming that there are no false keywords in the page, then all pages containing the search terms should be equally “Relevant”. What’s this ranking for?



Now, if there were some way of giving an indication of what our peers considered to be interesting parcels…. That would be a wonderful assistance to searchers.

Traffic used to be an indication of where our peers spent their time, but that was gamed to such an excessive extent that SL, who excel at doing absolutely nothing in the face of clear abuse, had to take action.
Picks used to be an indication of what our peers thought worthy of a spot in their limited set of Picks, but that’s going the same way. In the context of SL, Picks had the possibility of being a more relevant IBL than are general IBLs out in the WWW.

Two methods of indicating interest and quality are destroyed by greedy muppets and a service provider that sucks.



This “Relevance” ranking in SL delivered purely via parcel HTML is a myth – from the point of view of delivering the best results to the user. It’s a shiny Holy Grail. It’s nonsense.

Someone above referred to a potential/fantasy marriage of myself and Phil. It’s been raised in other threads since the time of grillion page threads leading up to the ban on Traffic bots.

In a strange perverted way, it’s not actually unimaginable.
There is a fine line between love and hate, it’s said.
There is a similar-ish link between laughter and really good sex.

Phil gives me a lot of belly laughs. Stuff like this:

But then, before the feelgood of the laughing gets a chance to morph into warm feelings, the brain zeroes in on the pathetic fantasy-based attempt to be patronising.
“..I thought you knew all this, anyway - I taught it to you ages you….”
Feckin’ idiot!
Sorry, no marriage. But… in an age of entitlement, where for instance a guy can sue for not being allowed to enter the Miss Australia contest - (Really! Look it up) – maybe we could have an acrimonious divorce without having to get married first.

There's even more of a similarity between good sex and sneezing. In both cases the climax is very enjoyable, and in both cases it can suddenly fade - right at the point when it's allbut there Sneezing has the advantage that men can also have multiple climaxes

The sad thing is that Sling actually believes what she writes. That's ok in itself - it's her attempts at misleading people that's the sad bit - and her need to resort to untruths. For instance, nobody with an ounce of sense can see someone having a "belly laugh" over such a paragraph, although I suppose that someone who has had it explained to her as many times, and by as many people, as Sling has, including in this thread, and still hasn't managed to grasp it, could perhaps produce a belly laugh over it; i.e. someone who is a few slices short of a loaf.

Btw, Sling. Contrary to what you imagine, you and me getting married, or even together in any way, is way outside the realms of possibility. I much prefer to have sensible conversation with people I spend time with, so you're permanently out of the running, I'm afraid - sorry.

The tension....the fine line....that raw passion.....making progress.

I hope Taintee is taking notes....this is far more valuable information than a pick system.

Well, you presumably speak from your own experience of failure to climax, so I won't argue.




Now, now! Clearly to anyone with a brain, the 'bellylaugh' - as I highlighted it specifically in the post - is entirely on the punchline of the paragraph. "- I taught it to you ages you…."

Throughout these threads, you suffer from two major delusions
1) That your repeatedly saying something makes it so. Lawyers term this "Proof by Repetition".
2) That those who do not agree with you know nothing and that your assertions are educational to them.
It's just a lame attempt to put down others by appearing to patronise them.




Awwwwwwwwww! I'm crushed All my nightmares shattered.

Clearly? Maybe.

I don't think I'm guilty of repetition, except that I suggested that you read post #64 twice. Nevertheless, some people do need telling more than once before they manage to grasp it - and some people never even manage that. As for those who disagree know nothing, you are wrong - nothing new there though. It's not a bad idea to try and hide behind it though but it doesn't work. In this thread, you have been shown to be wrong by a number of people - not just told, but actually shown. Most people would accept it but not you, Sling. Do give post #64 another read. The answer is right there

oops almost forgot i participated here...

i think you have to agree ....paying people to place you in their picks is hidden advertising and gaming the system , just look at it black and white ..no grey areas.. ?

But then again, there will always be something that allows for gaming the system, i know i try it too in my moderate way.

i sell some basic camping scripts, and for a while i even had some camping spots for some of my renters, but i cant see myself paying for picks ever btw.

i think: unless they randomize the listings (As suggested earlier in this thread), there will always be a way to game it.

as mentioned too ...maybe adding a advertisement tab on the user-profile, isnt a bad sollution


.

The reason I only quoted this part, is because it is the conclusion of your lengthy post.

What I wrote earlier:



Relevance ranking in SL is just as much a myth as relevance ranking on the WWW. Why? because it all depends on how well the person building the website/parcel is aware of SEO techniques. And in the end, the parcel that is put in search, results in a webpage. The better someone knows how to use SEO on the parcel, the higher they will rank.

Now there is no way to actually measure relevance of the actual content of a parcel. There simply is not. The only thing that can be measured, is the relevance of the resulting webpage in search. When searching for a "gothic male outfit" for example, no search system in the world can measure which parcel has the most relevant content for me.

So what I say, is give the designer more options to build his search page. So the designer him(her)self can, just like on the WWW, optimize their page for those keywords they think are relevant. And optimize the search appliance for that actual page content.

You might say: but then it still is the designer/merchant defining what is relevant. But that will always be the case. It is on the www the same as well. Those with the best knowledge will rank highest, while other pages might be a lot more interesting to view. Yet you (almost) always end up at places that offer what you were searching.

What you (if I understand you well) would like, is some way of having the user (consumer) define the relevance. And for search, that will never happen with the tehniques we have now. It works very well for mouth-to-mouth, but never for search.

Maybe a nice example/challenge:

When searching for full perm animations, my animation store comes up third. Bits and Bobs, last time I checked, did not appear on the first page. Yet many more people shop there then with me. And in the end, their content is more relavant to the search words as well, they cover a much larger range of interests then just the eritoc stuff I sell.

Now how would you think this can be solved? How can B&B rank higher then me?

My viewpoint: By search optimizing. And believe me I hardly put in any effort to optimize for this particular shop. Craigh probably could not care less about his place in search, as B&B is found anyway, everybody knows them. So he did not optimize, where I did. And that is probably the bottomline of search: no matter how good the stuff is you are making, if you do not do your homework to be found, no one will find you. There is no magical way of indexing quality stuff.

That is why I say: give us better possibilities to build our html pages, rank those, and punish keyword abuse.

back to the original subject: Why, if LL specifies that we should find ways to gather picks in order to rank better, are we wrong if we do so?

So why should one parcel with "gothic male outfit" rank higher than another with "gothic male outfit" in a simple search for "gothic male outfit"?
The search optimisation is totally irrelevant to the needs of the searcher.



Use genuine traffic and genuine natural Picks in the ranking algorithm.


Ranking methods in which ranking is solely dependant on the technical skill of the parcel owner in optimising for search do not serve the searcher.

There is *absolutely no good reason* to rank one maker of "gothic male outfit"s higher than another simply because they are better at search optimisation.
All that does is to raise a barrier to entry. The nature of the barrier has nothing to do with the nature of the products/services.









Back to the original answer: Not all ways of gathering picks are honest. Paying for Picks is a dishonest way of gathering picks. This is because it works directly against the reason for using them as a ranking factor. It is gaming Search.

You're wrong in your head, Sling. You've been shown time and time again in this thread, and countless times in the past, that what you just wrote is entirely the way that *you* think it should be, so you call it dishonest to break your rules. That's just stupid. It's not even hinted at by LL.

"countless times in the past"??
Oh, you mean the Traffic Bot threads.
In which I asserted that Traffic Botting was dishonest and cheating.
In which you asserted that it was not. That LL had not banned it or even hinted at banning it. That because it was not against the TOS it was not cheating. That it was only me expressing my opinion and nothing else? That I was wrong?
Those countless times?

In which.........
After which ......

Would I also be wrong in thinking that LL banned traffic botting..... that I asserted was cheating and you asserted was not?

You're wrong in your head Phil. Over and over again.

Not entirely so, but I do understand where you're coming from. Search algorithms are however based on words that are indexed, and inbound links in most systems.
In order to be found by thr searcher, the merchant has to provide a good webpage for search. There simply is no other system available.


Impossible. Picks will always be bought, whether it is with friendship or with lindens. Traffic is even more stupid: a shop which is very easy to navigate keeps visitors shorter then shops that take some time to explore. Larger stores will always end up first, as it takes more time to navigate them. So much for traffic.


Again I understand your reasoning, but so far it is the only way. The entire internet, but also document collections are based on indexing content and metatags. Guess who puts up the metatags? Certainly not the person searching.

However this does make me think... there are systems where searchers can value the metatags or add tags. Which might be a nice addition, though I wonder if the Google Appliance could work like that.



Yet who defines honest? Certainly not you or me. We CAN however, determine what we find dishonest. And there lies the difference: You claim it IS dishonest. Your opinion is not the infinite truth (neither is mine).
But you also forget one very important thing: LL, whether you like them or not, directly told us that to get a better result, we should find ways to gather picks. So if it is gaming search, they are the ones asking us to do it.

So what ways are there to gather picks? Let's take a few:

- Asking our customers by putting signs in the store
- Asking our customers by group notices in store groups
- Giving customers discounts if they have our pick
- Randomly hand out a nice item from our store each day/week/month among pick holders
- Randomly hand out cash each day/week/month among pick holders
- Giving each pickholder a weekly/monthly prize
- Giving each Pickholder weekly/monthly cash

Now again: who defines which of these methods is dishonest? All of them are stimulating people to place a pick in their profile. Except the first two, all do give a reward.