The Discussions on Traffic Reform with the Lindens

Yes!
Very good point.

If Google didn't use the 'hit counters' displayed on websites to rank them in search results then the the only way left open to Google would be to list sites alphabetically.
This is why Google is such a completely crap search engine.
Every time I try a search in Google, all I get in the top pages are sites that use programs/bots to constantly hammer their own 'hit counters'.

From Page 1 of this thread:

His overall message has been that he has no gripe per se against traffic, except that he would like them removed from the 'Places' tab. And that the removal of the 'Places' tab altogether would, indeed, solve all ills as it relates to this matter.

Is it a she? lol

Pie posted what she described as "hits" at me. She doesn't merit any response from me, and I sure don't feel the need to clarify anything for someone who wants to start fights.

Phil has been advocating getting rid of the Places tab, and with it any need for, or benefit in using, traffic bots - at a stroke.

But as Pie and many others have so aptly alluded to, traffic affects all areas of the search engine. Why not just champion the removal of the traffic metric altogether? Now is the time to fight this fight. Only after its removal may we start the healing process and start with the business of implementing a more fair and equitable search system for all involved entities.

What???? That's totally untrue - totally. I've no idea where you got that idea from, but it's totally untrue. No search engine reads or uses webites' hit counters.

I'm not interested in anything that Pie wrote, but I'll answer you.

Removing the Places tab will deal with trafficbots in their various forms at a stoke. Keeping the Places tab needs a good alternative way of ranking places (that isn't alphabetical), and I haven't seen any suggested alternatives that can't/won't be gamed. So, since there is already another Places search that produces very good results, why not just remove the Places tab.

I've also posted that simply outlawing trafficbots and traffic camping with blog post will be very effective. That's the only alternative that I've seen that will actually work.

[added]
Since I wrote that I joined the group to push for getting rid of traffic, I've revised my view to getting rid of the Places tab and leaving traffic alone, as it's good for the All search.

The two must go hand in hand or we're going to end up with a bigger mess. Removing traffic and then afterwards finding alternatives is not the way to go. The search issues need to be raised now.

LOL!

Lighten up Phil



Of course I know how search engines work - or as much as most people know about it.

I just sort of forget for a few minutes while responding to another post.



DUH!!!!
Only SL uses the equivalent of 'hit counters' to rank searches.

Trying to get rid of traffic gaming by getting rid of the 'Places' tab is analogous to trying to exterminate a roach infested tenement with a can of Raid spray.

Its not going to happen.

I thought you were being serious lol

Why? What benefit would there be in gaming traffic if the Places tab isn't there? You do know how little its influence is in the All search, don't you?

Masterfully played, sir!

Me thinks you underestimate capitalist ingenuity Phil.

That's not an answer. The question was, what benefit would there be in gaming traffic if the Places tab isn't there? You do know how little its influence is in the All search, don't you?

I'll answer it for you. There would be no reason at all - no benefit at all - to use trafficbots and traffic camping if the Places tab didn't exist. And the answer to the second question is that traffic counts for 12 IBLs at most - easily matched with 12 extra Picks that can easily be arranged.

Not to undermine your knowledge and research Phil, but I'd rather hear this from a Linden on the search development team, backed by facts and figures (with little pictures and digrams). Besides, why the passion in keeping the traffic metric? If it carries such little relevance, why not just get rid of it once and for all and remove all doubt?

Promise?
Because the same money the stores pay you to falsify traffic numbers can be paid directly to LL for classifieds - or they can buy more land and pay LL more tier or pay it to a Live Performer that would use the Lindens to pay LL his tier. We really do not need campers to pass our money to LL.

The problem is that we have been weaned on the Places tab as a meaningful search tool for relevant places, as search was too anemic. Places, being ranked by traffic, was an indicator of where people went and what might be worth seeing. With the advent of camping and later of bots, this became meaningless.

Places as a tab should be listed as "Place Directory" - making clear that it is a white pages-style item, and then sort by alpha. The problem of AAAAAA111111!!!! Furniture Sex Freebies Camping will eventually cause people to stop using it as means of finding relevant results, when they get sick of looking for places starting with A. But a search of places should use the new search tool to find relevant results, thus defeating the purpose of using AAAAAAA111111 as a preface.

The new search is better, and Torley needs to put out another video about how to make it faster, like intitle: and other operators that will produce faster and more accurate results.

Why the passion in trying to find faults? I have no desire about traffic one way or the other. It can stay or go as far I'm concerned. I think it has some value for the All search, but not a big enough value that it *must* be used.

You can accept or reject people's knowledge as you wish. It's nothing to do with me.

Ok, so then we both agree to have traffic removed altogether?

Thank you. Now we can proceed unified in our cause.

There is really no reason why we should assume that one traffic link is equal to one pick link or that the relationship would be unchanging. The GSA has a feature called source biasing that lets them apply different weights to different URL regex patterns.

how-it-works link for the curious:
http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/50/help_gsa/serve_scoring.html

I'd be perfectly happy with traffic being removed. I've said that from the start of these threads if anyone had cared to read the posts. Personally, I think the Places tab should go - or at least it should be filled with the All > Places results - as I've posted before.

We already have the 'All Search' for residents to do their searching. We don't need the "Places" tab to do the same. It is repetitive and unecessary. As you've mentioned, the 'Places' can be a directory. It could be broken down by category, Ie., Homes, Furniture, Clothes, Shoes, Hair etc. All residents would be given the option of being listed on it by their primary business offering, and perhaps two or three other choice offerings, prompted by the completion of pre-set blank category fields in their description. Merchant's primary business offering would be given higher listing priority over all others second and third options in each category. Like the Yellow Pages, the alphabetical orders would be of little if any significance. The important thing is that customers would have an alternate mode of search that would bring accurate results for the items they are searching for, as opposed to the 'All Search" which is a gamed system, yet deem viable by some.

That's a very interesting page, Viktoria, but it's about biasing the ranking order of the results set, and not about the weighting of links from various sources.

There are 2 biases: date and source URLs. The date bias won't be used in SL because LL creates the pages often. The URLs bias is simply to favour the pages from different URLs (e.g. pages from info.site.com can be favoured over pages from lib.site.com.

When crawling the pages, links are taken from the 12 traffic html pages, and stored as words, which are attributed to the target pages. The same happens to all the other pages that are crawled, and their link words are stored in the same index. There is no biasing in that process - not as described on that page, anyway. So it's safe to assume that all links are equal.