Big Shuffle in the All Search. Will it last?

When there's no limit on keywords, you're absolutely correct.

However, in SL, when the keywords are taken from the land description, then it might actually make sense to allow this. I see no reason why someone shouldn't be able to put "sex" in the desciption 30 times at the expense of other keywords to help refine and augment. Let 'em focus on what's important to them.

I don't know how it actually does work in SL, but either way would be fine with me. Due to the limited keyword space, it can't be abused.

Minor point, in any case.

As far as effective debating.....what you're doing is making some of us who actually use techniques that you approve of and consider ethical....wring our hands and say screw it....someone is going to nit pick every move I make and make a judgment call....someone is going to have a problem with any marketing tool I use on my list.....so might as well go full force and use any technique available because there is going to be one or two who have a problem with Anything we do.

If that heppens....then your arguments and debates become not only non-effective....but detrimental and damaging.

Not that I feel like your voice speaks for every customer out there or every store owner out there (since you're not a store owner)......it's just that the relentless judgment calls keep ringing in my ears and tell me to go label every product and every wall and every floor as Sexy Furniture, Wild Furniture, Sex Furniture, Sex Furniture, Sexy Wild Furniture.....that's what I feel like doing once you start going down the list and start picking away.

Then, you've lost your battle. Completely.

Quoted for Truth.

This is not quite True.

Even if Picks were totally removed from Search then people will still pay others to Pick them. Is an effective form of advertising given that many people check out Profiles. Even better than an advert from the advertisers point, its an endorsement. Whenever I check out a persons profile and look at their picks, and I see anything interesting then I will go and have a look. And I dont really care if they got paid for their endorsement or not. Just like I dont really care when sportspeople in real get paid to endorse products. If I like the product I will buy it, and if I like the sportsperson then I will at least look at it.

I've never considered Pick Buying on equal terms as bot trafficking.

I don't care about how much it weighs in search. I want the Pic there...so that when someone is out milling about, another person reads their profile...scans through their picks and thinks "I should go check that place out." That's how I find a lof of places, myself.

I send out gift certificates to group members at random who have the pic in their profile. That's the same as "buying." More or less. You can debate that aspect, too.

But once you start debating that aspect as well....you've just determined that what I thought was a nice gesture is now a sleazy technique.

I'm not making anybody do anything.
What I am doing is attempting to encourage a society in which gaming Search is generally seen as unfair and dishonest. It's activism.

There appears to be two main options for people who see others gaining advantage through gaming.
1. They join in the gaming.
2. They pressure LL to slap down the gaming.

If there are actually people who will nit-pick *every* move you make, then I'd say that that is due to the atmosphere created by the gamers.
If gaming were not so blatant, widespread and growing, you really would have no worries about people nit-picking.

It's sort of like Free Speech. I'm not going to approve of some of the things that it allows. However....I have to tolerate those, in order to be allowed the liberties that I treasure.

I've had heated debates against bot trafficking in the past. But I watched what was happening. People making a judgment call on that behavior.....started going down the list and started making judgment calls on marketing tools that I'm very comfortable with.

So I had to silence my voice on the bot trafficking and let it go....and even had to muster up a tad bit of tolerance for people who use a technique that I totally disapproved of....in order to hang on to the techniques that I feel comfortable using.

You lost an Ally in your crusade.



No....at the moment, the "atmosphere" that I'm considering basing future decisions on....is created by the nit-pickers.

You are correct to day that it is not *quite* true.
There was a time when a Pick was precisely what you talk of.
I'm a profile junkie. I'm constantly looking at Picks and have found some great places that way that I might never have found via Search.

However, that's all changed now.
Systematic institutionalised Pick-buying intended purely to game Search rankings has subverted the real function of Picks.
Again, the *ONLY* rationale for using Picks as a Search weighting factor was that the Picks were actually what they used to be.

The gamers are pissing in the pool.


"Even if Picks were totally removed from Search then people will still pay others to Pick them"
I really don't believe this. Perhaps a few might, but I honestly don't remember all the inducements to place Picks before Picks became a Search weighting factor.

Since you ask, you are one of them. There are others who didn't ask, so I won't name names.

There is no reason to try and do something that can't be done. In fact there's a very reason to specifically avoid doing it. I suppose it would be nice to factor the popularity of products into the rankings but I take back what I said to Lear about it. If the Places tab search ranked according to a genuine measure of product popularity, then the rich would get richer and the poor wouldn't get much of a chance. Also the old and established would get richer and the newcomers wouldn't get a look in. So any form of popularity in the rankings is a bad thing, imo.

You obviously know a lot, so you'd better go and teach the web search engines about that. Start with Google.

What's just plain silly to you is how search engines work. Without actually "understanding" pages, they have no choice but to rank on cold data. Maybe you should go and teach them your idea about that too.

As far as picks (IBLS) are concerned, if an algorithm is written to assume that a page with plenty of matching IBLs is more relevant to the searchterm than a page with only a few of them, then people with pages should be out getting more of those IBLs, because their pages will match the algorithm better. They would stupid to listen to the twaddle of people who are either ignorant of things or prefer them not to go out and get more IBLs for the sole purpose of climbing the rankings.

A few days ago, someone told you to "away and shite", Sling. I thought about writing that Sling does it already, but uses his/her mouth for it. But I didn't write that, even though it's perfectly true. Wasn't that nice of me

Unless you want to come and work in my store all week, and see how much work is involved, and what a store owner deals with day to day....I don't want you as my Activist. You can't be that voice unless you've walked in my shoes.

I've heard people say that unless you pay their tier....then you can't make their calls for them. Well, unless you pay my RL house payments....I don't want you making judgment calls for me. Your "activism" is a wee bit more threatening to me than tier payments.

And I'm sorry Phil....for stepping into your thread. I know you've been courteous about not stepping into mine. But I've had it with this nonsense.

You misunderstand the overall situation.
This is not my crusade.
I'm just one voice in one SL backwater visited by a small minority of residents. Even the Lindens don't cone here except very occasionally.
That's no way to run a crusade!

How many threads have I started on the topic?
..... None.

What happens is that the topic gets raised and I say my piece. Then there's a ding-ding because some take exception to my description of gaming as dishonest. Then it tails off and all is quiet until the next time the topic of Search is raised by someone.


Again, the nit-pickers would not have any hope of an audience were it not for the blatant gaming that goes on.
The gamers have created the atmosphere that now gives you grief.

I think that you are being deliberately obtuse as usual.

You seriously think that any decent search engine would look at the two pages and ...
One has "hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel" in the title
The other has "hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel,hotel" in the title.
The second is more relevant to "hotel" than is the first?


Yes, I understand how IBLS work.
Within SL, anyone who understands how Picks work in the GSA and who wants to maximise ranking by any means possible would be well advised to engineer the maximum number of Picks and try to ensure that the link text in the IBL was optimal.

Your misdirection to people is to try to assert that because I object to gaming of Picks that I do not understand how they work.
This is clearly not the case.

That, plus when it doesn't get raised, you still say your piece - like in this thread. The problem everyone has is that your "piece" is mostly nonsense due to your gross lack of understanding much of what you are talking about so you just waste everyone's time or you alienate them - even those who largely share your views (except for a very small number of equally ignorant people).

Don Q: Ola! That windmill has been struck by lightning!!



Cervantes; Yes. And there are storm clouds gathering over those other windmills.

Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said said something about one page having one more "hotels" on it. I'm sure that's what you said. Are we changing the subject now that you've been shown up?

Do you understand how IBLs work, Sling? Do you really understand? I don't think so However, it does appear that you understand *that* they work - but not *how* they work. Would you like me to enlighten you? LMAO!

Well you can bang your feeding bowl off your high-chair as much as you want.
The mechanisms of search engines are described and discussed in detail all over the Net. The information is there for all to find if they have a mind to. I'm a tech. I've read widely and I understand it.
This however is totally irrelevant to all this debate. It's not the mechanisms that are in question. It is the abuses of the mechanisms that are in question.


This is a reality that you seem incapable or totally unwilling to grasp.

You promote yourself as a tech guru. You believe your own propaganda. You try to beat others down on the basis of your claimed tech wonderfulness.
And yet... you are the guy who had to be told that his published SLURL was landing people under his floor.





It's clear that you operate in a moral vacuum.
For example:

You produced a bot system who sole purpose was to maximise the number of bots in a farm. It brought the bots in and out to match the avatars leaving and entering the sim.
You poured your time and skills into something that was always unfair even if LL have only recently blogged to ban it.
Through all these threads you have banged on about how your bots up in a box were causing minimal load on a sim.
Now you designed a system that brings bots in and out. Each arrival and departure loads up the grid, the sim and the adjoining sim as your arriving and departing bots are child avatars in the adjoining sims. If your bots are logging in and out, you are hitting the login servers as well.
What would have been the outcome had LL not coincidentally banned the practice? Others would have joined in.


You describe your creation as a thing of wonder.
The same argument of tech purely for tech sake could be applied to a biological weapon.
It is simply a neat piece of engineering without any regard for the consequences.


I've said it before, and I'll say it again...

You know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The old ALL Search system was text orientated and gamed to death and was totally meaningless. Entering spaces or leaving the Land name totally blank would get you to the top of a keyword search. (from the keywords one had in Land Description)

I like Cervantes.

Pep (He said: "There is no limit to a woman's intelligence, provided she is not required to be coherent"

Ask Sling to pay your Tier each month.....then maybe you can follow her level of Ethics.

What then is: making sure you mention things you offer in the BEST way the SE concerned can understand? Because that is what we try to do. When I take myself as example, I try to create good products, and according to the comments I get, I do succeed in that.
Next is, getting customers to see my products. So I investigate the search engine, and optimize as well as I can. Linden Lab published apart of the info, the rest I found out myself. Well, with a little help In my opinion, no gaming. Even (your friend?) Sling calling me a lowlife cannot change that.

Now let's say that having a keyword in each item, helps me get higher. So instead of naming my item "Couch Bertempat 3 seat", I name it "Couch Bertempat 3 seat (low prim furniture)". Is that gaming, or still valid according to your values? (this system does not make sense anymore but it did in the past).

You are assuming that most customers care about "popularity" when it comes to searching.

Someone already made the point, what does popularity matter when looking for a product such as furniture, or clothing, or animations? What I customer, I assume, would care about most is that the product function as they want it, or look nice.

(In fact, for some products, you might care about popularity in that you want to steer away from what is popular. Many people like having something unique, rather than having what everyone else has. There are several great clothing stores at which I stopped shopping precisely because I started seeing my favorite outfits worn by everyone else I meet.)

Until we have some sort of authoritative survey on what customers once, it seems to make more rational sense to me that for certain products, most customers probably don't care about the "popularity" of the shop. The Traffic is a random ranking factor they could live without.

Plus, it really isn't too hard when one visits a shop to tell that the traffic is gamed through bots. I can usually spot it right away. Give customers credit. If they truly care about the Traffic, and want to avoid or boycott places with Traffic bots, they would be teleporting out before making sales. Their time is still wasted if they teleport to a place expecting something "popular" but finding it isn't. On the other hand, the gamers, who after all are gaming to increase the bottom line, would also find bots hurting their sales and would stop using them.

Now, a place that sells a product is different from a place that sells a social service, such as the club I co-own. It is more reasonable to expect that people finding my club in search actually care about how the Traffic numbers translate into popularity. When they come to the club, they want live people with whom to interact.

I still do small things to boost traffic (staying logged into the parcel when I'm actually watching television). However, an army of traffic bots or campers would backfire on me. The club is only truly active about 4 hours a day. Someone coming to the club and seeing that the Traffic is nowhere near a realistic representation of the actual activity there will never come back. However, if someone teleports in, and no one is there, but the Traffic is realistic for a club that does 4 good hours a day, that person might at least consider, "I'd like to see this place during an Event when it's busy."

The small things I do to boost traffic are still meaningful. Within the niche that the club targets, even a few hundred points of traffic can mean significant jumps in the search rankings.

It would be nice to know more about what customers actually want in the search rankings. Unfortunately, Linden Lab doesn't actually ask. I know Linden Lab makes sweeping statements like, "Almost everyone agrees traffic bots are evil." Am I sure that conclusion is backed with the same scientific rigor, as, for example, "Only 2% of Second Life is devoted to Adult use."

Mickey I resent this remark! Okay... you do look better then me but I have female customers too. Now I do know Phil is not a pretty dude but I rock!

What strikes me as funny is that in this thread we seem to agree more then ever. Now I do not aim to agree with everyone, I go my own way, but it is nice considering the disagreements in the past.

@Ordinal:
One more question about your vision on gaming.
I own (well, rent) an entire sim (Homestead). 1/4 of that is my furniture store. That does rank not too bad in search.
Now my stuff is layed out well, beds with beds, sofa's with sofa's, chairs with chairs. So I could parcel up and try to get my fireplaces high for fireplaces, my beds for beds, well you get the picture. That would make sure that people looking for a nice low prim fireplace, find my store. Would you consider that cheating too?

Well I do not know about you, but I am a customer as well. So I do know what I am looking for. And that is results that are an actual representation of what I look for.

If I want new animations for my furniture, I want to find full permission animations. And no sexual ones but actual sitting ones. So I look for the right keywords, lets say: +full +perm +animation -sexual -erotic. And if the first few stores actually sell those, I am happy.

If I want a new sarong (occasionally I wear those) I want stores that sell them. I do not care about traffic, not about popularity (?), I want sari!

Back to search gaming for a bit.
Every business that puts lots of efforts in search rankings, will have to sell what they offer. If not, they will be bankrupt quickly, and disappear from search. Because it is no use to be on #1 for low prim furniture if you sell biabs. So the system 'cleans' itself, the BIAB seller will soon be out of business as they wont sell too much.

What I think furthermore, it that it takes serious business owners to rank high. It is not something you do in a minute, it takes lots of work to get there and stay there. And I think that is something a BIAB seller won't do. hardly any, that is.