The Discussions on Traffic Reform with the Lindens

Any ranking system that depends on the activity, profile picks, groups or votes of SL avatars is a nonsense.
If each unique avatar were a unique RL person, then those indicators would be useful.

If I wanted 10,000 avatars to put me in their Picks, I could either create accounts or rent a pick off someone who had the accounts.

I detect a lot of confusion in this thread (and others, and in-world) about how Profile Picks are intended to work as IBLs for the new Search engine. I think this is because we're all so hypersensitized to the hideous mess that Traffic has become as a Search factor that we're inclined to see everything as "gaming the system." But you can't "game" a system that's explicitly designed to be manipulated--and that's the whole *point* of using Picks as IBLs. The crucial thing to understand is:

Profile Picks are not popularity ratings.

It's emphatically *not* like traffic. It's simply a means for those with listings they want to show in Search to control what text will be indexed for finding those listings. That's all.

Some businesses are engaging in weird, superstitious, magical-thinking *attempts* to game the system by providing incentives for lots and lots of residents to link their Profiles to the parcel listings, apparently on the premise that if some are good, more must be better. It doesn't work that way. Indeed, the more Picks out there linking to your parcel that you don't personally control, the less you're able to control what text is actually used in the indexing.

There's lots more to be said about this, but a tremendous amount has already been explained in the threads quoted in the forum sticky on this subject. But there's still too much misunderstanding about how Picks work, and their intent as IBLs. It's not that this is the best possible system for generating IBLs, nor is it very analogous to how IBLs get formed when Google search indexes the web. But it's just not sensible to rail on against something for not being "fair" at doing something it was never designed to do in the first place, or being "gamed" for being used exactly as it was intended.

.........
Some businesses are engaging in weird, superstitious, magical-thinking *attempts* to game the system by providing incentives for lots and lots of residents to link their Profiles to the parcel listings, apparently on the premise that if some are good, more must be better. It doesn't work that way. Indeed, the more Picks out there linking to your parcel that you don't personally control, the less you're able to control what text is actually used in the indexing.

Lord gaming the traffic system is wrong, dishonest and unfair for real content providers who cannot get into the top search listings because of camping sites and bots. Re-classify the camping sites and bot sites under anothe rtab and do not allow then to have any impact on real traffic metrics. New Players will still click on a serach tabe entitled FREE MONEY and teleport to your camping site. And others will be able to click on a TOP TRAFFIC SITES tab and see real content (if they uncheck the mature box).

I have an idea, which I assume must not be feasible else it would have already been considered, but I'll just throw it out and see what someone says about it.

When it comes to advertising in Search, why not give every listing a limited number of keywords (let's choose an arbitary number- 30 words). When the Search engine is ranking for relevance, the first key words get more weight than the last keywords. So, just throwing out arbitrary numbers, the first keyword gets a weight of 30, the second gets a weight of 29, the third has a weight of 28, and so on.

Keep the "description" field separate from the keyword field. The Search engine only uses the keyword field for returning search results.

Now, every single listing is equal in terms of the amount of weight it can give itself in a search (465 points, based upon my arbitrary numbers). It's up to the creator of the listing to choose the ways in which the points are spent, by prioritizing the keywords.

I'd think it would be a difficult system to game, because any choice to load up in one kind of search has the consequence of knocking the listing out of a lot of different kinds of searches. One could load up with using each keyword for "sex," and be assured to be near the top of any search that consisted only of the keyword "sex." However, that listing still couldn't be guaranteed of topping the search on "sex" (since anyone else could load up with using all 30 keywords for "sex." Using all thirty keywords on "sex" would guarantee that the listing did not show up in any search that did not include the word "sex." (And of course, any searcher can use a "NOT sex" search option to kill the listings with the keyword "sex."

The description field is separate, simply so someone can do a nice, plainly written description without having to worry that a helpfully-written description would kill the listing in the Search engine.

Since options for searchers are nice, you could have an option to use "Keyword Relevance" (searching just based on the keyword field and returning rankings based on the keyword points), or turn that off and just have the standard search like now (free-for-all search on keywords and descriptions with no particular ranking ranking system of word placement).

So why not do something like this?

....I like this idea very much. Why won't it work?

You can tell this is a good idea because it's the only one no one has responded to negatively. It would allow Traffic to be completely eliminated and yet still return relevant results for people. It doesn't rely on warm bodies or cold bots, it doesn't lend itself to being gamed and allows business owners to describe their businesses separately from the keywords they would use to draw customers, regardless of if the business was a clothing designer or a jazz club. You, as a consumer, would be able to make better decisions about where you were going to bother trying to teleport to based on the the actual business description of the keywords you used to find the listing of the business in the first place. I, personally, would love being a little better informed about the places I was going to spend 5 mins trying to rez.

I like this idea very much. Why won't it work?

(2) According to the idea, the points for each use of a particular keyword are added up, meaning that a place could top the results for "sex beds" simply by repeating the phrase 30 times. If the place only sells sex beds, then it has a grossly unfair advantage over other places that sell more than just sex beds, and that's bad for users - great for the sex beds only store though.

I get the strong impression that some people think that doing anything at all to improve rankings is gaming and/or cheating. They are welcome to think that, but they are wrong.

The best response to that is:Either the "sex-bed" store is doing nothing more than improving its ranking and you stated that's inherently fair and not cheating, or you have to come around that "improving your ranking" is "grossly unfair to other places".

And you can usurp keywords anyway with only a few picks, you can already do what you're objecting to already today and it won't even be visible to anyone.

Actually, more *is* better, Qie.

Uh oh. Really? Well, that sux. I thought the Pick-based IBLs topped out at 12, and they counted one per pick. If this is yet another contest of who can scam the most alts or cheap-sucker Pick-renters, then LL truly has not the foggiest clue how to run a useful Search, and should just disable the in-world Search button altogether and we'll make our own. FFS, if the sky's the limit on Picks, then screw it, I'll just pull my parcels out of Search altogether.

Does anyone have a pointer to a source that describes how Picks will influence Search rankings?
--- IF they have any influence on ranking.

People can't just create alts with Picks in them and expect them to count as IBLs - they won't count as IBLs, so the sky isn't really the limit.

Why wouldn't they count? What's the source of this information? We know they're used as IBLs so what makes you think SL knows the difference between a main account and an alt if it doesn't know the difference between a regular account and a bot?

It sounds like you confused Picks IBLs with the IBLs that traffic produces - traffic produces a maximum of 12.

It's nowhere near as easy to game the Picks as it is to game traffic. People can't just create alts with Picks in them and expect them to count as IBLs - they won't count as IBLs, so the sky isn't really the limit.

Why wouldn't they count? What's the source of this information? We know they're used as IBLs so what makes you think SL knows the difference between a main account and an alt if it doesn't know the difference between a regular account and a bot?

But it's still mighty disappointing. Why can't LL just make a simple content-based Search function? Why must *everything* get weighted by some number of somethings scammed to out-something everybody else?

There are all these super-efficient naive indexing algorithms from the Good Ol' Days of I.R., based on simple application of information theory. I sketched out a jira, back before LL made the GSA decision public, that could be satisfied by any of a wide array of such algorithms, and give much better results for the relatively tiny body of text that is SL than can be achieved with dopey link-counting, unless there's a truly vast corpus (such as the whole Web), or very tightly coordinated and enforced guidelines for much less extensive content such as SL.

If the Picks-based IBLs had been capped as I'd understood, it would be a (slow and stupid) content-based search. In contrast, leaving the IBL count unlimited like this is exactly the kind of mistake that will make the new Search results *decay* in quality over time. I can see somebody thinking that this makes it scalable, but in fact it's quite the opposite: as long as it's subject to unfettered manipulation (like pay-for-Picks), it will just become ever more meaningless, just like Traffic did.

A shame. A dreadful, embarrassing, par-for-the-course shame.

Only avs that have spent money with LL have webpages. Even avs with PIOF, but haven't spent money, don't have webpages. There was a long thread about it not long ago in which it was confirmed that setting up a group (100L) caused an av to have a webpage. Other cheap methods of spending money weren't tested, except that being an owner in a group, and paying the weekly fee, or part of it, doesn't work.

it's still mighty disappointing. Why can't LL just make a simple content-based Search function? Why must *everything* get weighted by some number of somethings scammed to out-something everybody else? ... If the Picks-based IBLs had been capped as I'd understood, it would be a (slow and stupid) content-based search. In contrast, leaving the IBL count unlimited like this is exactly the kind of mistake that will make the new Search results *decay* in quality over time.

Thanks for that info, Phil. I missed that thread. That mitigates it somewhat but it really doesn't eliminate my point...

Nothing will totally eliminate it except a human-edited directory, which would be a disaster if it became a well-used way of finding things.

I don't think that's the case, but you may be right. It seems to me that LL should just stop factoring in any metrics that can be as easily gamed as traffic and profile picks and give us more effective ways to tell the search engine precisely what's available on our parcels. The only thing that should ever be "rewarded" with a high search ranking is actually having what the searcher is looking for. That's it.

As I said, it can be influenced. But look what's happening - the place will be ranked higher for searches that are relevant to it, and there's no reason for it not to be.