How to kill your business without really trying

Glad they helped you Phil. However they just shat on weeks of my hard work. My land no longer shows on search outside of the sim. It only shows up when you are in the sim. I don't know if this is related or not or is completely new. SL will never be a viable business tool with this unreliable crap. Hours and hours of work now in the toilet because I cannot be found. Anyway i created a JIRA for anyone having this same issue. http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5399

I also updated my picks with the *new* LM to your store Phil. . . . . Still love your stuff!!

So given picks have such an influence on ranking in the new search. What happens if you buy a plot of land which already appears high in some search for some topic due to lots of people having picks to it. Given the high turnaround in SL, som of these may have left SL or not logon a lot, or just not prune their pick lists often etc. so that plot will still appear high for that topic even if you are using the land for something completely different.

Under the old search - you could quickly and easily remove land from appearing under a particular search topic/term just by changing the description. However, under the new search, is there a risk of an increasing growth of clutter in the search results due to outdated picks still existing?

Matthew

Ty Shauna. I do appreciate the comment

Ty too, Rosey - it's appreciated

I've never heard of that effect, Felix. It's certainly different to the effect of joining land.

They didn't actually help me personally. I've got my rankings back to where they were before I joined the land, but I had to do it myself. What they are doing is making a change that will help everyobdy in the future who has rankings that matter, and who want to add to the land.

Unfortunately, that's right. New owners could IM people who have the Picks for the previous topic, but how many would actually do that? How many would leave things be, with the idea that it's good to have people coming to the new place, regardless of how they get there?

LL needs to update the Picks in people's profiles with land changes, but they can't do that because Picks are largely use for friends, etc.

That's good for the landowner (perhaps - depends what previous uses the land was used for, and who keeps turning up ) - but not for the end user as the search gets cluttered up with results based on land uses long gone...

Whilst you will always find LMs for places long gone, at least in the old search the results were current (not always accurate due to people miss labelling parcels - but current). At present the search is too new for there to be too much clutter (apart from that introduced by people using picks for friends rather than places), and the optimisation tricks work mainly because not many people are using them.

However, as the clutter builds and as more people try the tricks - how long before the new search becomes too cluttered to use? As I've said before we don't have the same richness of description, structure and hyperlinking in the current implementation of SL which the search engines can make use of to prevent this happening (too much) in the web searching.

I'm also worried that the whole search system seems to be based around workarounds - the picks behaving as an in bound link is a work around with quite a few flaws; the ideas of having seperate places and photo album tabs in a profile is really a workaround to the sorts of issues outlined here; the various "optimisation" tips are really workarounds; the idea of a joned parcel taking the inbound links/picks of just the larger of the two parcels joined (rather than all the inbound links/picks associated with both parcels) is a workaround etc.

That's the real reason I have concerns over the new search - it doesn't feel well designed, it feels like a quick and dirty hack, following by more quick and dirty hacks to get around fundamental flaws - it may (just about) be working at the moment, but how long unitl one workaround too many causes it to collapse into a complete mess!

And yes, I am well aware that search isn't easy - I just think it needs some quite radical rethinking and reworking on how things and places are described in SL, and as indicated above, perhaps, better integration of how hyperlinks can work between 2D and 3D webs to work, rather than trying to bolt something onto a system simply not designed for it.

Matthew

A thought on this...

I know that LL has at least 3 seperate datacenters that deliver results. I know this because two nights ago, 3 of us were receiving different results for the same searchterm and the same settings. Repeatedly searching again and again and again still produced the 3 different sets of results. A datacenter is a complete index and query processor. The large web search engines have many datacenters, and each datacenter is huge.

It's possible to update one datacenter/index while it's servicing live search queries, but it's better to take it offline during the update, while another one services the queries. That would require 2 datacenters, but LL have at least 3. The datacenters are not updated with fresh data simultaneously so, when more than one of them are servicing queries, they will sometimes return different results, and I was seeing 2 nights ago. The next night (last night) all three returned the same results from my store's point of view, but there were probably other differences that I didn't notice.

So I'm suggesting that you and your people were getting results from different datacenters, and the locations (in or out of the sim) were coincidental. If that's correct, then I'd guess that the results where your place wasn't showing were the most up to date ones - unfortunately.

No we discovered that search is broken for private islands. If you do a "Places" search from a private island, it omits all mainland listings. My business is on mainland so it is not showing up to search queries done from the private islands. So it is a different but very serious issue to anyone running a mainland business.

I don't disagree with any of that. I've said myself that using the Google system is like trying to push a square peg in a round hole, and also that the amount of data that it has to work with is very limited, and contrived. It's totally unlike anything that web engines and the usual internal engines find. E.g. when a document is deleted, it is eventually removed from the index. Any links that pointed to it often remain but, since there is no document at the other end, they don't affect the results - they don't push a non-existant page into the results. It's different in SL though. Land always remains, and only ever changes hands, and links (Picks) that point to it cause it to be returned in the results, and clutter is bound to increase over time.

Offsetting the clutter right now is that (I think) most landowners don't yet know how to improve their rankings, but they are learning, and more and more relevant places will climb up the rankings. But it could become a big mess in time, due to clutter, if things stay as they are.

I didn't know that. Someone in the blog talked about it - or something very similar. Rebooting the island fixed it for them.

Rebooting the private island? Because it did not help my parce to appear from having the mainland sim rebooted.

I just read that post and that sounds unrelated. This new issue has been seen by everyone I have asked to test it. Sorry for intruding on your thred with my initial post but i did not know it was unrelated at the time.

I just went to a private island, used search, and my mainland store came up as normal.

Correction: It's post #28 in the blog, and it was about his/her sim itself dropping out of search - fixed by a reboot. It doesn't actually say that's it's an island but it could be

Hmm for me, I searched for your business from a private island in "Places" search and it does not show up at all, but does from mainland. I went to 4 other random private islands with the same results. I am searching in "Places" not the new "All" search.

**EDIT** had a friend verify with me on this.

Verified again and again.

I see it now. I hadn't realised that you meant the Places tab. My mainland store simply doesn't get listed in the Places tab, when searching from an island. That's bad.

My question would be this, what about picks actually influences the search ranking? Is it the URL link back to the parcel in question? Or is it the words that people use in their picks?

It's the link text. Every avatar that is set to show in search, has an HTML page created for it. On that page is a list of its Picks, and the title of each Pick is used as clickable link text to the HTML page of place it is a Pick of. Link text is the single most powerful ranking factor.

I've noticed the very same thing yesterday, my mainland store shows up in the places search (and old all search) when I'm on mainland but not when I'm on an island.

And my ranking hasn't moved up in the new all search after I lost my ranking when joining my parcels so far, it's really absolutely frustrating

i hope they fix this soon. i'm sorry to all of you who have been affected by this glitch. i'm sure they are working on it as we speak. *coff*

It won't move up unless you do something about it.

I know Phil, but what can I really do? Walk around all over SL and pay people for adding my store to their picks? Beg my former customers to do so? Drop my landmark on every avatar that crosses my way?

No, that's just not me

I was happy to see to get a good ranking over time without doing any of the above and I guess I'll either have to wait for things to pick up again with time or consider quitting if it doesn't.

It's just plain wrong that something like joining a piece of land can have such an impact, killing a part of the results of many months of hard work in less than a second.

I'm not saying it's like starting all over again because the new all search certainly isn't the only way for people to find something in SL, but it's still bothering me a lot because it is such a common thing to join land in SL that it should and could have been considered and avoided before making the new search part of the viewer

If it's not you to do it, ok, but some of your customers, and probably some of your friends, added your place to their picks because they wanted to - either as a quick way of getting there, or because they wanted to help promote your place a bit. It doesn't hurt to IM them, explaining briefly what happened, and asking them if they'd like to go back and redo the pick. Some of them may appreciate you letting them know that then pick they have is no longer helping in the search results, and how to make it count again. When I did it, I got replies from some of them, praising my stuff - they really did want to help.

So you are saying that it's the text on the Pick tab, and the Pick tab itself that is considered the outgoing link to the parcel HTML page, and not the parcel description at the bottom or the any of the other links at the bottom of the pick? Interesting...

If I understood the question correctly, yes. If you are set to show in search, there is an HTML page for you. Have a look at it, and see your Picks listed, with each of their titles as the link text to the various pacels' HTML pages. *That's* the biggie in ranking factors - that link text.

Yes. As Sansarya Caligari noted in another thread, you can find Canimal by searching for her friend Mulch. The description for Mulch doesn't breathe a word about Canimal, but that is where she made the pick for Mulch.

Ok, now I understand.

It's 'Jethro Stubbs' that has an HTML page because I enabled him to show in search, and it is this abreviated version of his profile that SL searches for the Top Picks.

And with that out of the way, my ALT is set to show in searches and yet his HTML page does not appear in searches even if I seach his name.

Is this because he's my ALT, because he has no payment on file or because they don't want us to game the system with multiple ALTs?

And going back to the abbreviated HTML profile, why aren't classifieds shown and counted on them?