How to get into Popular Places

"idiot" is too strong a word, imo, but the same could be said of anyone who is looking a particular type of something, but only searches on the one word

The new search does eliminate camping - for the new search. The effect of traffic is very small, and simply not worth paying campers for. Maybe that's what was meant.

I think it's partly that the "new search" is being resisted a lot, and therefore traffic is still useful for people searching by the old methods.

I mean.. to be brutally honest, the problem is that a truly ideal, non-gamable, quality-based content search of Second Life would result in 1%-5% of the businesses on the grid capturing 90% of the search hits, which would seriously damage SL's position as a business platform and/or a haven for creativity.

I don't know that it is being resisted. It shouldn't be resisted, because it's the best way forward by a very long way. What it lacks at the moment is content (text) to parse and rank on, but LL could do things to improve that situation, and they may do.

There is no search engine in the world for which people cannot do things to improve their rankings. All this talk about gaming is wasted, because there is no way to programmatically overcome it. The idea of listing the results in random order isn't even free from it, AND it would produce poor result for people.

It's being resisted by many older users (those who still like the "dream" because of its heavy tilt towards established builds. Surely you saw the "what's the point of paying more than minimum for a classified now?" thread?



That's not quite the point. It's good that people can do things to improve their rankings, we just want to make sure that those things are beneficial to everyone, or at least to the people who go to the site.

Bots?


nah they are re-animated cadavers, ie: zombies

No brains and they never make the Tea!


The pop places is not used by residents much -because they are:

a) always the same
b) always full of cow droppings and or zombies

what we need is a resident recommended review - wot like Amazon have


(mind you, its possible to screw that too -eg David Hasselhoffs Album)

I don't recall that thread. This is the only place where I see a fair number of older users. Inside, I rarely see anyone who is older than me, and I'm relatively new. We don't have access to the statistics, but my impression (from my business) is that the new All search produces a lot of traffic.

The thing is that, as long as it's possible to do things to improve rankings, they will overdone by some, which forces others to overdo them too, in order to compete. If someone puts the word 'skins' in the land's description, then it will come in the results for 'skins', regardless of whether or not the place has anything to do with skins. If the place's traffic is high, it's ranking for 'skins' will be high, and that's what is disliked. The All search will place it very low down in the rankings, where it will rarely be seen, which is why I say that the All search is the way forward, rather than trying to come up with ways of improving Places and Popular Places.

The All search needs more text to work with, and it needs the owners of places to optimise for it, but it is *the* way forward, imo.

I know, but that doesn't mean that people like it. As I've said, the fear is that it makes it harder and harder for new businesses to be noticed, no matter how good they are.



Right. But the way forward is to make it so that the way to get higher on the search isn't by putting any words at all in your description, but by making good skins.

I agree with that. Well established places are already in plenty of people's Picks, and it would take time for a new business to do the same. But it's no different in RL. It takes time to climb the search engine rankings, although it's quicker than getting loads of Picks here, especially if the established places are also intent on increasing Picks. Even so, I'm still convinced that the new search is the way forward. It needs some work on it, but the system does rank on relevance - no other SL search does that. It's just that it doesn't have enough data to work with yet.

That can't be done programmatically. It would require the subjective judgement of people, and the SL population can't be used for that.

True, but SL has to be better than RL, because SL has to sell itself.



Yet!