Town Hall Question: Stop the Search Abuse!

I'm glad and grateful that you are focusing on fixing in-world Search -- thanks!
While you're at it, can you add some rules about keyword abuse?? Google and Yahoo do it -- can you? It is frustrating that every time I search for something, I have to wade through 20-30 casinos, sex clubs, and other off-topic classifieds before I find what I'm looking for. And this is what my customers go through when they look for the products I sell too.

Google and Yahoo use filters that eliminate abusers, who can of course resubmit their listing (without the gazillion gratuitous off-topic and repeated keywords) to be included.

seconded

Thirded.

Fourthed!!! Its tedious!

Fifthed, if that's a word...

Broccoli

I agree with the OP.

Mandy C

Nice escape from sounding like you have a lisp with sixthed

Although I agree, I think it would be harder to implement in SL than in google. Google just has to look at the keywords and see if those words actually occur in any form throughout the site. SL would have to make a guess at completely unrelated words from items. For example, keyword "sex", with an item "whip".
Would we then end up with the same system for getting round the google checking, with people dumping prims on the land with specific names, just as google cheats start including passages of text containing their keywords?

Good point, looking at it from your point of view I think it would be a lot harder to implement then I originally thought. Also I think someone at LL must've at least thought about this.

Mandy C

I think what we need for searches really is a tag-based system. ie when you list something for search you enter say 10 'tags' or keywords (though it can be phrases if more appropriate). Then these tags can be used for the searches.

This has the advantage of:
- Reducing the work that needs to be done in indexing every title and description
- Forcing people to pick the most relevant keywords/tags for their advertisement
- Search results can be ordered fairly easily by relevance. ie if someone's searches matches 3 of your tags then your listing has a relevance of 3 points.
- Plenty of room for additional functionality such as stats (see how many people got to you from each keyword) and for self-policing by letting users report falsely listed or misleading keywords which can then be removed (possibly bumping down the offender's tag allowance).

This can be implemented as simply as an extra full-text indexed field in the database where all tags are entered as a string separated by spaces. Then the simulator/whatever handles the tag-entry simply checks you haven't entered too many, or entered any duplicates (ie using all ten of your tags as the word 'sex' to get a relevance of 10 for that word).

Here's the link to the JIRA proposal for tags (go to jira.secondlife.com first then click that link if you want to vote).