PPRS (I need my resident database for paid locations)

No, Sling. In the previous Pay for Picks threads and discussions, and in this one. Sorry, Sling - you're wrong again (and boring).

Since this became a thread about search, one more thing.

What is exactly defined as gaming search?
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Every search engine uses parameters that count for your ranking. To start with, of course it is the content itself, as far as it cam be indexed. Furthermore, there are metatags defining what the item ranked is all about. And of course, what other items are referring to this item. Inbound links. We can probably think of some more.

So how, as a publisher of content, can you make sure you get found? By using the right words in your content, and more important, by using the right metatags. Simply publish a document simply is not enough, in no system with more then a few documents.

Now before Search All, Places search was the main thing, and the only parameter was traffic. The more traffic you had, the higher you ranked. So the only thing an author could do is make sure they get traffic. Camping, lucky chairs, and later on traffic bots.

Then came along Search All, and more then just traffic counted: we got an html page, and inbound links for example. So in order to make sure we would be found, we had to make sure our html page was good according to the indexing method, we got some traffic, and we got inbound links.

Are the things above gaming search? No way, about every search engine is based on this. Without people optimizing content, no search engine can do its job very well!

Things get different, if I know that many people search for sexbeds, and use that knowledge to get people to my plants store. In the hope they see my stuff and buy plants. But they were looking for a sexbed! So I cheated them by making them think I sold those.

Long story short:
Improving ranking and selling what you promise <> gaming search
Using keywords but not selling what you promise == gaming search

Indeed, the only reason you should get irrelevant results within Second Life is because of false or wrong keywords.

By that definition, Traffic Botting is not gaming search (provided that they wee not using false keywords).
The botters were simply improving their ranking.

Would you agree?

According to a regular poster in these sort of threads, something is not wrong/cheating if LL have not banned it.

By that logic, if LL have not explicitly banned false keywords, then using false keywords is not gaming.
Or would the argument become that while false keywords *are* gaming, they are *not* wrong/cheating ?

As you remember, I never opposed to traffic bots indeed. Since traffic was the only way to get your place higher, and bots were permitted by LL (yes, I am one of the people that actually asked that to LL), I do not call it gaming search. As long as the descriptions were honest, the searcher got what they were searching.

That said, I always opposed to using traffic as a search metric. Places Search was by far worse then the Search All we have now. Traffic is a very bad search parameter because it does not say anything about the content. HTML pages do.

Well I am not that poster. What I say is that search engines are based upon the providers of the content being crawled optimizing for that crawling.

Using false keywords is not optimizing for the crawling, it is offering stuff you do not have. That is why I say using false or wrong keywords is about the only way to game search. To game searchers. They end up in a place not offering stuff they were searching for.

Yup. SL is very different to the world wide web in terms of relevance regarding crawling pages, there are a lot less variables, which is why keywords are the big issue with returning irrelevant results.