How to kill your business without really trying

Yes and no. That does ensure that it is getting Linden attention, yay! But I bet that Linden's don't run a whole lot of businesses inworld.

So, if folks on this thread feel that there are specific symptoms or suggestions that should to be brought to the developers' attention, starting a pJira just to state those concisely certainly couldn't hurt your cause. I doubt their software guys will go digging thru this thread, tho if you start a Jira issue, it wouldn't hurt to cite this thread.
.

What about forcing all picks to the Landing Point of the parcel? Instead of my pick to Hair Shop X being in front of my fave hair, the pick point would reassign its coordinates from my chosen ones to the Landing Point.

This would of course, have to tie in with the whole combining the parcels problem; which parcel's Landing Point to maintain? My suggestion is to still maintain the last parcel selected's options re: Parcel Name, etc.

It doesn't make sense for a pick to point to No Parcel, ever. Even if it changes hands, it should point to SOMETHING. It does, but the fact that the system doesn't recognize what it is is bizarre.

I think the entire using "Picks" in the rankings is silly

Most of the people I know use picks to display pictures of their friends and lovers, basically like a public photo album. The parcel the pick "points" to is entirely irrelevant to what people use it for.

Cristalle made a JIRA to get rid of friends in Picks; to create a new tab for friends...

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1704

The same "mess" happened to me yesterday when I joined two parcels. I had joined parcels before and I have always wondered which one has to be selected first to keep the settings, but it seems to vary from time to time

Before I joined my parcels yesterday I cut out a small piece of the parcel that was not yet part of my shop parcel, then renamed both parcels to see which settings would stay in place when rejoining and it was the second parcel I selected.

So I went on and did the same with my shop parcel, but this time it was the other way round...

All of my shop's parcel's settings were gone - but much worse, today my "new all search" listing dropped from page 3 to ... well, I could not find it at all even though I stopped looking after 20 or so pages because nobody would go that far anyway

Really, this should not happen because it's a common thing to add land to a store (or whatever business).

I don't think a lot of people do have my store in their picks (at least I've never asked anyone to add it), so I don't think the listing going down is only a result of the "missing" picks, there must be something else involved.

I know of one customer who had my store in his picks, when checking what it now says (by using the new search) I get this:

"Page not available. We're sorry: This item's privacy settings prevent us from showing you any further details about it."

The only thing that was not affected was the traffic count, does that make any sence?

I always knew I didn't like the new search

This is the problem with using a google appliance (we've had this discussion elsewhere).

The google engine is designed to index structured interlinked documents.

A typical document indexed by Google will have keywords and content, and the content will be highly structured (have titles, subtitles, paragraphs, lists, etc.) and contextualised i.e. the meaning of a word will be reflected and disambiguated by the surrounding words (e.g. in that last sentence it was fairly clear I didn't intent "word" to mean 16 bits!).

In SL we don't have structured descriptions - we have a few hundred characters to shove as much details and keywords (often in quite a mish-mash due to space) as we can.

Google places a lot of emphasis on inbound links - in SL we don't really have in bound links. We have landmarks but those aren't really the same thing, and we have picks, and as has been pointed out, picks are often used as a photo album of friends with no relevance to the underlying location (indeed, my impression is that this use is much more common - a typical pick list seems to be a picture of the avatars home, one or two places they like and then about 4 or 5 friends).

As such getting a google appliance to search SL locations is a very kludgy hack - personally, I'm surprised it works at all.

To work better, LL needs to radically rethink how objects in SL are described such as

i) allowing long HTML descriptioins on parcels, avatars, picks and objects
ii) allow the use of SLURLs in such descriptions to link to parcels, avatars, picks and objects
iii) work with google to include SLURLs found on the internet at large to factor into SL search rankings.

Matthew

Matthew

I'm sorry that you were caught out by it as well, Minke. It's a pity that you didn't find this thread before you joined the parcels together.

I'm unusual in this forum because I actually like the new search better than any of the others. It's the best search we have in SL in spite of its shortcomings, because it ranks on relevance. Yes, it's a square peg in a round hole but, if LL continues to improve the way they make use of it, the difference in shapes should get smaller over time. For instance, if they do things like add a Friends tab so that Picks are only places, the results will improve. But, imo, the most important thing is for people to understand how to optimise their places for it. Jojogirl's post shows that people on the whole don't know how to do that, even though Jojo is a regular here and could have known, and in another thread, someone who is a very regular poster didn't know, and was very pleased to be pointed to an old thread where the information is. The system does produce very relevant results, even with the small amount of data that is available to it. It's up to the owners of places to make their places relevent.

Phil... even though your testing has stopped, i'd still like to know 2 things ~if/when~ they happen:

#1 when did your name return to its proper place in the new ALL search? (how many days later?)

#2 when did your links finally update themselves in the other avatars profile? (how many days later?)

Just a word of agreement. Admittedly, I never much liked the other Search methods, and at first I was really skeptical about the new Search All, too, but I'm liking it better and better now, both for advertising and for actually finding stuff I might want to buy. It does absolutely require "engineering" by advertisers to make it produce relevant results, but those who spend the time are well rewarded by customers who actually want to buy what's on offer.

heyas;

i just want to add this bit of information -- i dont know if it will be helpful at all in figuring out what happens to re-parcelled picks. (and in all likelihood, you'll never have to deal with it directly.)

it concerns swapping sims. if you'll recall, ll recently rolled out a new option for people to swap class 4 and class 5 sims, if they own both. before this was rolled out, it was actually put into process (an experiment, perhaps) in raglan shire and raglan commons.

raglan shire was a class 4 sim. a class 5 sim was puchased, and the two were swapped out.
so on the map you have
raglan commons: class 4 sim, used to be raglan shire, used to be one sim south
raglan shire: class 5 sim, brand new but in the same map place where the class 4 used to be


so? okay, my partner and i are renting a plot in raglan commons. it's the same coordinates of a business that has been in raglan shire for a good while. everybody who uses their landmark to get to the raglan shire business ends up teleporting to our plot. (im not sure about picks, but landmarks, definitely.)

if you look closely.... this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. the "world" coordinates for the shire store haven't changed. the new sim got put on the map where the old sim used to be. same place in the "world" of oceans, islands, and continents.
the old sim got moved to a new place. and it got its name changed and yadda yadda. but landmarks to the old sim still point to the old sim, even though the old sim is a new build in a new map position.

oh wait, that does make sense. because if you move an island somewhere... landmarks still go to it. hm.



anyway, it boggles my mind, but might be an insight to coordinates and how they're stuck to land?

Thank you Phil

I had this happen before when joining parcels so I knew it was a risky thing to do, I sometimes was successful with keeping the settings from the old parcel, but sometimes I wasn't even though I had always tested the "joining order" before, it seems to be a totally random thing when in comes to "joining order" unfortunately, at least for me

Personally I don't use the new search when I look for something, I'm still getting too many 503 errors and I don't like the fact that I have to go to a new page for additional information and then back to the listings, I definately prefer the layout of the old search. In addition I don't like the fact that classifieds no longer show in the new all search, just too many steps to get what you want. It may of course end up a lot better than what it is like right now

I'm not even sure where people come from when visiting my shop, yesterday's traffic was pretty much the same as always even with the "missing new all search" listing, however it seems somewhat lower today, judging by sales so far, but then sales also vary greatly from day to day so it's hard to tell

It will be interesting to see though how long it will take for the ranking to be back in its former position, if at all

I'm going to second that I much prefer the new search. I've learned a lot from you Phil about how to list my store effectively. It will continue to improve as other locations learn how to effectively list their locations as well. Just one more thing to learn, but far worth it.

I found before Classifieds were taken away that I was using the new search entirely and never referring back to the old one. I hope it comes back again soon.

As 3Ring said... any updates, Phil? It's been a few days... have things changed at all?

Yeah... I'm rooting for you too Phil, and have been lurking this thread to see how things are going for you, but decided to pipe up and root for ya.

bump.

question: there has been talk of viewing traffic income... how do i view where my traffic comes in from?

Thank you for the good wishes, but no news of any note. I don't expect any following Jeska's post, as all the old Picks are valueless for rankings now, and won't be put right.

I moved up to the second page at #15, but I've just seen that the test piece of land (the old store's land) came back in after I set it to show in search, and pushed me down to #16 lol

I'm in the process of contacting all the people with Picks to try and get them to go to the store, delete the existing pick, and add the store again. I know that some have done it, but I imagine that some will find it very odd, and not bother, or even delete the existing pick. So far I've IMed everyone who has the existing store, and there are a lot to IM who have the old store in their picks (those are why it came back in quite high up).

It'll take a few days, but I'll get back up there.

The only way to see anything is when you have a classified. There are stats in your profile as to how many teleports there were from it.

I've had this issue since December 27th when I resized the parcel where I sell my main products. I've worked with both Concierge support and more recently a representative from the Linden search development team... today they reported the following:

"We have researched your inquiry further and it appears that resizing the parcel is what caused the problem. We have opened a bug internally to track this issue and should have a solution shortly. I have spoken with our search team and they believe what happened is that when you change the boundaries of your land parcel, it changes the parcel ID that is listed in search. Since the parcel ID is changed, the page also changes, which of course means that other references to it are no longer valid. This new issue has been opened as a bug internally, as we investigate preventing this from happening when you "join" additional land to a parcel. We realize this is a serious issue and will continue to investigate it and determine the best solution."

"In the meantime, I would encourage anyone who is impacted by this bug to contact the people who currently have your parcel/business added to their top picks (you can find this by searching the All tab for your parcel name and noting the avatars who have listed your store in their picks) and asking them to re-add you. I know this is a clunky workaround and apologize that it is the best one I have at the moment. "

Alvargi

Alvargi, have they updated the progress on your ticket at all?

I don't have anything helpful to add to this discussion, but wanted to tell Phil how awesome his stuff is. I've got your items in damn near every room in my house.

Well, I see Phil is now famous - he's the lead entry on the official SL blog:

Four days ago, Resident Phil Deakins reported a drop in the search ranking for his low prim furniture business. Phil, my apologies for using you as our example! The drop in search ranking followed Phil’s purchase of additional land, which he joined to existing land. You can see Phil’s original, more detailed description at: /327/8c/244502/1.html.

With a promise that they'll fix it

Dang, they really ARE reading the forums!

"Phil’s report helped us identify a major design flaw in the way parcel joins are handled in our database (not in search, but in the database). "

GO PHIL!!!

Kinda nice to know they are paying attention to us!

And the subtext there is that they ARE paying attention to the forum

I am sceered now.