All search error blogged

No ETA - that's disappointing (for me ). Today every parcel in my store's region was added to the "privacy setting" error, including the region's page. [UPDATE] They are all back now - even as I was writing this post. I wonder if they are all back and the problem is fixed. I was going to write a load about the results suddenly going totally haywire, which they were not many minutes ago, but they are back in shape too.

ALL Search is still not fixed properly.

Over the Easter period one of my commerical regions didn't even list in ALL Search.....7 shops lost lots of traffic and potential sales over a 48hr period - that was very annoying!

I saw today, that I could not drill down into the product listings for many shops, which again probably lost a lot of traffic for those businesses.

LL also sneakily changed the weightings of IBL's over a week ago....delivering some very strange illogical results bearing the amount of time Businesses spend trying to crawl up the listings, which can take months....to then have the goal posts moved.....totally s@cks!

according to the status blog, the search has a new backend system



No significant changes, implies to me, that there were some insignificant changes (insignificant to them at least) otherwise they would have said, that there were no changes that affect search rankings.... right?

Today (yesterday now) might have been different. Every parcel in my store's sim and others, including the region pages themselves, returned the "privacy settings" message, which is just a fancy way of saying "we don't have that page" - a 404. The reason it could have been so widespread today is because they were rolling out the new backend to fix the problem, which possibly meant recreating all the pages. So today's mushrooming of that message might have been a one-off while the new replaced the old.

That's not really an "issue". Search engines are moving the goalposts all the time, affecting, and even killing, many people's real incomes. The difference with search engines and LL's search is that search engines are aiming at something such as getting rid of this or that, or improving the quality of the results, whereas LL people can only tinker. I.e. they can't rewrite, or add to, the algorithms to make improvements in the results. I understand that LL does have ability to adjust some things such as using the GSA as a wholly content-based system, and they may be able to adjust the degree to which IBLs are effective, which is something they may have tinkered with recently. That sort of change is something that we have to accept is going to happen from time to time. For most people, it's just play money anyway - unlike the web where the amounts of real money lost can be very significant. I once lost in the order of £40,000 a year in web earnings when Google made a significant change. Web engines develope, usually with drastic results for some people, whereas LL's GSA system doesn't develope - it can only be tweaked, so drastic changes aren't possible, which is to our benefit.

we have been listed and shown <privacy thingie> then totally not listed even for specific name parcel search... then missing.. then shown and all ok... then poof .. then region not even showing and round and round and back and forth.. when spefic name search is used.. then classifieds should pop up on the left.. which they dont...

they keep on closing my ticket telling me it is resolved (funny haha) and i keep opening it..

Earlier (my today) i contacted concierge chat again and this time asked for an ETA... which of course they dont have.. maybe now hence the blog and grid status thingie..

its not only frustrating but shows seriously in sales.. down from the average 25~30K to less than 10K. So not only is paying for listing and classifieds a waste of L$ ... income is down too.

One thing LL is really good at is major borking.

/rant

Visit the thread started by istephanija munro on Xstreet General Discussions forum how it effected some people. I guess the more erratic movement might have occurred on some of the more popular keywords as opposed to niche ones.

The key here is in LL statement like you pointed out "Note: there have been no significant changes that affect search rankings. "
"No significant" maybe and I tend to agree with that, but certainly minor tweaks which has effected some listings. As Phil stated above, "it can only be tweaked, so drastic changes aren't possible, which is to our benefit.". My guess is that they probably downgraded the value of PICKS amongst other things and placed greater emphasis on other areas.
It's a matter of trial and error to see what works........but time consuming when more time is required to actually create Content instead.

I sympathise with you eku.
I had much the same nonsense with LL. I had Linden engineers visit our sim on Dreamland estate, when it dropped off ALL search entirely over the Easter weekend.
They even changed the host server, which had zero effect....maybe reduced lag a bit-lol....then again it might have been due to the lack of visitors -rofl
Traffic and sales were hugely effected needless to say.

Doing business on SL platform is a real challenge...you never know what is going to happen next.....performance issues, search tool changes or LL policy changes

I wonder if they've forgotten about the web search - it still returns results with a *lot* of stuff missing. Maybe it will automatically catch up or maybe they need to do something to it.

thankies for the sympathy... they again closed my ticket saying it was fixed .. but ugh.. some parcels are showing but not the main one..

plus i got a major harrassment AR thingie going on so i am definitely not loving LL very much atm..
i tend to just close the support window when they really p*ss me off .. so i dont end up swearing at them and getting in the doodoo myself...

what i have done to soothe myself is move our PCs into a sunnier and bigger room.. and tidy and pretty up the SIM to make space for summer stuff...

but i do so want to yell AAAAAAAAAAAGHHHRRRRG at random intervals

True. In-world my main store/land is at the top of the search ranking. In the off-world search that main shop cannot be found at all. That is for almost 24 hours now. Some hours ago I resetted my sim. I hope also the off-world Search picks it up again.

The webiste results are still pre-fix, and that's a full day after the fix was done. I've just reported it in live chat.

ahhh so this explains my random low sales days recently lol

I agree, it definitely seeems that picks have been devalued.

Yes, but that doesn't explain why two of my lands are not found by the offworld search AT ALL. Just as if they don't exist. At the moment, more than 36 hours and after a sim reset, the parcels still aren't found by the offworld search. I've submitted a support ticket.