What's going to replace traffic then?

I just heard that it was announced during the town hall meeting that traffic is going away.

The big question: Does this mean Land Search will work like classifieds now? You pay for the highest search listing?

Wow , really?

I never thought Id see the day.

*Does a snoopy dance*

Don't snoopy dance yet. If it goes like classifieds did, only corporate backed sims and already-established big names will ever hit the first page of results.

That would make the whole Places search redundant.

Additionally Traffic going away will solve more problems than just the gaming of Traffic to get high listings.

Finally to get to the top of the listings it took money - same as the classifieds.

Id really hope for a alphabetical or random listing.

If Alphabetical perhaps some limit in the number of AAA's or characters you could use at the start of your name.

People will at least be familiar enough with alphabetical listings due to their use for so long in phone books that they will know quality/popularity has nothing to do with name.

On the negative side - this will slow the growth of second life. And concurrent users will drop for a while.

If LL where to charge for posting on the land search, I think that the only reasonable fee would be like MLS service that gets a small percentage of the sale

Howeverand upfront charge might stop all the ridiculous priced property on there, like the 512 listed for L999,999

I'm not so sure that's a bad thing, myself. But as for traffic? It was nice to judge for the shops that didn't use camping for traffic, but anything else? *shrug* I judge popularity when I get there. If I see that the people are chatting and laughing, then I'm happy. If I don't see the 'noise' then I am not interested.

Add me to the list of people concerned about what its going to be replaced with. I dont know about any other smaller business, but I cannot and WILL NOT pay a huge amount to list myself at the top of any classified listing. Looking at those that have, they are misleading with some of the keywords they toss into their listing and its frustrating, to say the least, that so many are struggling to simply be seen.

I'd really like to know how they are going to do this but more importantly....what the affect on smaller shops will be. A lot of people use rented vender space in high traffic areas to get people to find their main shops. If those high traffic areas are no longer seen as much (however this will be changed will depend on that) the lower exposure those creators have.

Good luck to LL with this one...there are more pro's and con's than I can even think of

Very true Raudf

Thats why i dont think its going to hurt many people trying to find things, really.

Its going to cost some in world jobs though which is an added negative.

And Users online going down does have some Plus and Minus

I don't necessarily see that as negative, at least short term. Let the Monkeys bang on the stuff that needs banging on. A fresh coat of paint, some new drapes, and the Fotune 500's will be stepping over each other with satchels of cash.

What the hell am I going to do now?

I'm at the stage where I'm slowly but surely climbing the ladder, making progress and just starting to get some good traffic. Even with my little array of lucky chairs I can sleep well at night knowing I've earned my traffic, people are spending time around my chairs because of the quality of what I make, unlike camping.

With three lucky chairs I've been able to get myself on the first page when searching for words 'clothes, clothing, dresses' but there's no way on god's green earth that I could do that in the classifieds, I just don't have the money.

For their to be a free economy there has to be free access. Getting rid of traffic all together is going to make so much harder for new designers to make any progress, the established names will have an even tighter grip on the market.

Vale

Were you at the top of the of Places search?

Even if they get rid of it with regards to search listing, I hope they keep it around as something that you can see in the About Land window. I like checking the traffic number for my properties to see if people have been spending time there. I think it's a useful tool for landowners, but I'd definately like to see it taken out of search. I'm not fond of the pay-the-most plan either, but it's definately better than alphabetical. It's too bad no one has come up with a way to track true popularity that can't be gamed like the traffic and voting systems were.

Nope, never expect to be either (especially since its being taken out lol), but that wasnt the point actually, it was a side statement. Inclusive simply because with traffic there was a way (like Vale) to start creeping up the list without having to pay out any money and possibly one day achieve being at the top of the list. Without the option through traffic, I could not and will not pay to be at the top of any list. Thus, a concern about what its going to be replaced with. See, a side statement

Well, the primary problem with traffic is that people buy those numbers too. Yes, you could creep your way up, but there were always people willing to pay campers to inflate their numbers and push you further down the list.

I hope they come up with something good. More likely, traffic and find places will simply be ditched in the name of 'database load' with a vague promiss that it will be replaced. Months will go by and nothing will happen. And in a year, with their churn rate, nobody will remember there ever was a "search places".

Actually, in the case of a few keywords, there were days that my sim was on the top of the search list. So not every keyword selection was taken with people that were paying to stay at the top fo the list consistently. It was possible to be at the top (in the case of one certain search, which was a huge search for us and provided a lot of traffic, we were either #1 or #2). Along with this we had creeped up the list from page 2 to page 1 at the very least with other searches.

Now we have no way of knowing where we would be on whatever they supply for the new searches...that is if they plan on giving us anything at all? Many many maaaany people cant afford to pay huge ad fees to even get on the same pages as others, especially as they are weekly fees. I just dont know how they do it as it is, spending hundreds of $ a month.

Now, dont get me wrong, that isnt to say that search isnt mushed up because of high traffic areas filled with camping chairs etc. I know fully that the search by traffic has been a mess for a long time and didnt result in actual popularity listings. I'm just really curious about what is going to be put into effect in replace OF it....and what way people will find to get around and mush it up too.

Don't hold your breath:

I as one would applaud the removal of traffic, or at least traffic being tied to search. I would like to keep it just to see how many peole visited, but any system that uses traffic to determine search results can, and will be, gamed. The only real solution is to get rid of it as a factor for determining search results.

As a librarian and professional database searcher, I vote for the search results to be sorted by relevance.

There are actually librarian adages about "every book its reader, and every reader their book". This concept can be extended to any kind of search, and basically boils down to this: if you show the searcher what they're looking for, everybody wins.

Google and Amazon have made terrific use of relevance searching. Google even includes paid ads, but in a way that does not get in the way of the normal relevance-sorted results.

My ideal: If I search for "yoga", I see actual yoga shops at the top of the list. Places that just have the word "yoga" somewhere in a mass of 100 keywords would go at the bottom of the list. This way I find shops that actually specialize in yoga equipment, and the yoga shops get a customer that wants their stuff. Everybody's happy!

Heyyyy, thats what they should do, use Google technology to give us search results.

Then Google will buy SL and we will have GLife.

I should have known I couldn't get away with mentioning the G-word!

Maybe the sheep search will take over, instead. AKA don't ban the shepherd if you want to be in the search.

I think there's a JIRA proposal in the works (go vote for it!) to include qualifiers in search (e.g. 'and' 'or' 'not') etc.

you could search on "'yoga' and 'poseball' not 'sex'" etc....

Google search is based on the number of other sites with links to the page. Unfortunately in SL that's a bit difficult because it's much harder to get a "page", and the only equivalent everyone has (profile picks) is very limited. You could sort based on the number of times a site is selected in profile picks but that is gamable by advertisers who could create as many alts as they could afford.

The problem is, SL is not the web. Google ranks searches utilising the information it gets from links between pages. One might suppose that a page which lots of webpages link to must be important, so it should get a higher rank (although the ranking algoirthm is much more complicated than this in reality). We don't have links in SL. So how does one automate finding out if a location is relevant for a given serach term? Sure, if you've got a prim whose name involves the word "yoga" then you might assume that the location has something to do with yoga, and the sheep's search bot is doing this. But how do you rank those search results?

Sorry, I was referring specifically to the places search -- addressing the question of how place search would be sorted if not by traffic.

I gave Google as an example of relevance ranking (most relevant items get listed first), but I did not mean to suggest we use the actual algorithms. I think a much simpler keyword weighting system would suffice. For example, words in the land title field would be considered more than those in the description field.

Of course SL is not the web. But as I said, I search databases all day long. Some are web search engines, some are academic journal indexes, some are library catalogs, some are collections of scientific data. Although not all default to relevance ranking, nearly all of them offer it as an option.

So why is the concept of relevance ranking so revolutionary for SL search, when it has been widely available in other database systems for years?

Part of me fears the answer involves something like SL search being managed by magical chipmunks with index cards.