The Discussions on Traffic Reform with the Lindens
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Chip Midnight
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Join date: 1 May 2003
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05-02-2008 22:17
From: Susie Boffin Those links don't seem to work for me You're not missing anything. It's just a typical rant from he who shall not be named, slandering anyone who doesn't agree with him with a sneering 4000 word vowel movement. You won't find any reasoned analysis there - just vitriol, conspiracy theory, hysteria, and nastiness.
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Macphisto Angelus
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05-02-2008 22:19
From: Chip Midnight You're not missing anything. It's just a typical rant from he who shall not be named, slandering anyone who doesn't agree with him with a sneering 4000 word vowel movement. You won't find any reasoned analysis there - just vitriol, conspiracy theory, hysteria, and nastiness. Underneath the stuff you mention he does have points about how people do use search to find places etc. I know there is no love lost 'tween you two Chip. lol. I went to google to find blogs that support traffic and Prok's was the only one that came up. Had to present at least one other side to the argument.
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Chip Midnight
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Join date: 1 May 2003
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05-02-2008 22:27
From: Macphisto Angelus I went to google to find blogs that support traffic and Prok's was the only one that came up. Had to present at least one other side to the argument. I'm willing to bet if they hadn't announced the Showcase at the same time as overhauling or eliminating traffic it would have inspired a different reaction. I imagine there was a fair amount of giggling at the Lab before the announcement in aniticipation of the impending fit of apoplexy from a certain notorious gadfly.
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Macphisto Angelus
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05-02-2008 22:31
From: Chip Midnight I'm willing to bet if they hadn't announced the Showcase at the same time as overhauling or eliminating traffic it would have inspired a different reaction. I imagine there was a fair amount of giggling at the Lab before the announcement in aniticipation of the impending fit of apoplexy from a certain notorious gadfly. LOL yeah likely. Although before the showcase announcement Prok already had a jira open about leaving the traffic as is. I think he knew it was gonna happen eventually. Out of the thousands that Prok says he represents I don't see any other blogs, too many forum posts, etc saying leave it as is. If there is going to be a resistance to it they better start soon. Honestly I think 99% of SL don't care if it goes away.. they just don't want there to be any crashes in the viewer when they remove it. BTW I do see the point Prok is making. How will people find those smaller shops if there is not a traffic system in place. Word of mouth will not spread from English speaking to the Japaneese speaking, etc. Traffic right now is the only way to find places in search. It is flawed to a degree, but it does work for me. Whatever is decided I will adapt. I don't have a horse in the race shop wise. I do easily skip the first page or so in the search and start looking in shops after that.
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Amity Slade
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Join date: 14 Feb 2007
Posts: 2,183
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05-02-2008 22:39
You know, when I do a Search Places to figure out what kind of place might be fun to vist, and I can have a reasonable assurance of a decent-sized crowd, traffic numbers are helpful.
I know some traffic is gained. But it isn't too hard for me to glance at the place description and have a good idea of what places might have genuine, real life residents, and what places probably gamed traffic. That unscientific gut feeling, based only upon glancing at a place's description, is correct to a high degree of accuracy, in my experience.
So I'd say traffic does have a usefulness to a certain extent.
If traffic were a search option- and option that I the searcher could choose in sorting the results- then the true usefulness of traffic would be left to the ultimate experts- the Second Life residents.
I can check this useless little button about including Mature content. Why not being able to check a more useful button (to me, anyway) of sorting results by traffic?
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Chip Midnight
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Join date: 1 May 2003
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05-02-2008 23:08
From: Amity Slade I know some traffic is gained. But it isn't too hard for me to glance at the place description and have a good idea of what places might have genuine, real life residents, and what places probably gamed traffic. That unscientific gut feeling, based only upon glancing at a place's description, is correct to a high degree of accuracy, in my experience. So I'd say traffic does have a usefulness to a certain extent. I don't disagree, but that's only if having people around is a factor in your search. It never is when I search for something, so having the results ranked by something I don't care about is a hinderance, not a help. The current system punishes small businesses, new businesses, and everyone who can't afford to spend $4000 usd a month on a classified - in other words, everyone but those who least need to be found. It's not surprising that Prok would be against having it change. He runs a land rental business and those by nature generate large amounts of traffic. A small business on its own small parcel can never compete with one on a private island rental or megamall where they're benifitting from everyone else's traffic. They're forever relegated to the backwaters of search. Remember when he was all about keeping the little guy from being trampled under foot by the popular kids and big business? Obviously that was a crock. Now that he has an advantage that's being threatened he's singing a different tune. The old hue and cry about Linden favoritism surrounding the Showcase is just a red herring. Ah irony. Don't ya just love it?
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Chip Midnight
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05-02-2008 23:13
From: Lear Cale But I don't think you contradicted my point; without a clear risk/benefit reward to LL, they're not going to invest in policing as would be required to make any plainly visible deterrent. Perhaps, but it might not actually cost them any more than the manpower they already spend following up on ARs. Unless they try it we'll never know.
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Macphisto Angelus
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05-02-2008 23:22
From: Chip Midnight I don't disagree, but that's only if having people around is a factor in your search. It never is when I search for something, so having the results ranked by something I don't care about is a hinderance, not a help. The current system punishes small businesses, new businesses, and everyone who can't afford to spend $4000 usd a month on a classified - in other words, everyone but those who least need to be found.
Agreed. That is the glaring flaw in the system in place. That is where again a search like google has would be great to show sites that have relevence. Maybe back to a vote system where you can vote up accurate places (but not vote down to cover griefing). Only one vote per verified avatar. Yes, it could be gamed so how to take care of those that abuse it? last week I was looking for a Neko tail. I went to shop after shop that said they had them in the keywords but didn't. It was beyond frustrating and if they thought they were tricking me into buying something else just cause I was already there they bet wrong. It just made me not want to ever check their store again. Land rentals.. meh, that is easy to keyword and when you get there you can pretty well figure you will find places to rent. Not so with shopping. Search is used by shoppers more then anything else I wager. So how to make an accurate search out of what is already there?
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Amity Slade
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05-02-2008 23:39
From: Chip Midnight I don't disagree, but that's only if having people around is a factor in your search. It never is when I search for something, so having the results ranked by something I don't care about is a hinderance, not a help. The current system punishes small businesses, new businesses, and everyone who can't afford to spend $4000 usd a month on a classified - in other words, everyone but those who least need to be found.
That's why I say make it an option. The situation in which I would find it useful would be a situation in which I wanted to find populated places. For shopping purposes, traffic is meaningless to me. I don't like shopping in crowded places anyway. So in that case, I turn it off. It absolutely wouldn't be relevant to every kind of search, and clicking it to "off" would remove it from those searches for which it would be irrelevant. I'd rather see options to the SL Search engine, rather than people deciding what I, as a resident and consumer, should or shouldn't care about when I make a search. The more options I have, the better the Search works for me in finding what I want to find. I know some elements can be gamed by merchants to frustrate my search. But the more choices I have in my Search, the more I can defeat the attempts to frustrate my Search to game my results. Besides, once residents have the option of leaving "Sort by Traffic" unchecked, the value of all those traffic bots goes way down. The gaming traffic problem will disappear through market forces, rather than direct policy. As to the effects of traffic on advertising when it comes to new store owenrs, it's a legitmate consideration for consumers to consider the popularity of a product as a proxy for the quality of a product. In fact, that's the way market information gets spread; a relatively small portion of the consumers actually do the intensive work of product comparison, and the rest follow their lead. For every consumer to thoroughly research every product alternative is cost-prohibitive. Granted, there are lots of reasons why the SL economy doesn't really work like a real life economy, and I don't necessarily believe that traffic is some great measure of product popularity. But if you want an economy that functions well, you achieve it better through empowering the consumer to make choices, than dictating choices to a consumer. If traffic is truly worthless, then market forces should bear that out, if you give searchers an option to leave it unchecked.
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Amity Slade
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05-02-2008 23:48
From: Macphisto Angelus Agreed. That is the glaring flaw in the system in place. That is where again a search like google has would be great to show sites that have relevence.
How much money would it cost Linden Labs to license the Google search engine for use in Second Life? Of all the web pages on Earth, Google almost always finds the exact ones for which I'm looking on the first results page (though sometimes it takes that second, omre refined search). The Google engine in Second Life solves a lot of these problems, doesn't it?
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Viktoria Dovgal
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Join date: 29 Jul 2007
Posts: 3,593
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05-03-2008 00:43
From: Amity Slade How much money would it cost Linden Labs to license the Google search engine for use in Second Life? Of all the web pages on Earth, Google almost always finds the exact ones for which I'm looking on the first results page (though sometimes it takes that second, omre refined search). The Google engine in Second Life solves a lot of these problems, doesn't it? The new search runs on Google appliances, so the potential is already there. It maybe needs to be fed better information, so what should be added to or removed from its diet?
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Ciaran Laval
Mostly Harmless
Join date: 11 Mar 2007
Posts: 7,951
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05-03-2008 01:23
From: Susie Boffin I wiil repeat for the one billionth time why not just eliminate traffic stats completely? Replace it with what? If traffic goes there has to be some other way of ranking search listings.
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Tegg Bode
FrootLoop Roo Overlord
Join date: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 5,707
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05-03-2008 02:17
From: Ciaran Laval Replace it with what? If traffic goes there has to be some other way of ranking search listings. Nothing wouuld be better than false cheated results we have now, lets just let 2rd part search sites deal with it, then thye might take responsibility for the places they promote. Heck just make them buy trsffic points with Lindens instead of bots. It would be a lot less laggier. Here we are weekens again peak time and SL CAN"T HANDLE 64k, residents can't even login, but the bots are still TP ing to 23 sims a minute just fine. And then we get bot runners whining theirs sales are down and customers transactions are failing , ROFL! So that's it in a can, forget avatars, if you want to use SL, run a bot to do it for you.
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Phil Deakins
Prim Savers = low prims
Join date: 17 Jan 2007
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05-03-2008 06:02
From: Ciaran Laval Replace it with what? If traffic goes there has to be some other way of ranking search listings. Why do people want to think that it must be replaced? Why? It's *already* been replaced, for goodness sakes.
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Qie Niangao
Coin-operated
Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 7,138
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05-03-2008 07:51
Reading and thinking about this a bit, I was getting pretty confused about how traffic could be useful for finding the *smaller* shops (which still makes no sense to me) and worthwhile venues. What I finally decided was that the problem really is that almost nobody--LEAST OF ALL VENUE OPERATORS--are using the new Search features properly, with the result that finding anything--especially venues--is stuck back in the dark ages of Traffic. People just don't understand how to list their places in a way that searchers can find them.
I dunno why this is. The sticky is there at the top for all to read, and there's been a blog post about it that at least gets one pointed in the right direction. Yet there's all this weird superstition and misinformation about new Search, including that it's only really applicable to product sales.
I'll grant that maybe sometimes, as a tertiary criterion for deciding whether to actually attend a venue or event, one might Map the place to see if it's currently got anybody around. But Traffic is a piss-poor proxy for that, given that traffic doesn't reveal anything about the *times* when real, honest-to-god residents might be around. (Of course, with traffic gamed as thoroughly as it is now, a top Traffic score pretty much guarantees that there's nobody around but a box of bots somewhere. But imagine that's solved: still, do people really TP to a place with high traffic numbers expecting to find anybody around, not having checked the Map first? That's gotta be frustrating as hell!)
Anyway, I have what might be the germ of an idea. As b0rked as Places search is, Events are even less informative. I propose to attack both at the same time, by re-introducing voting stations, with a couple of twists: First, only Payment Info On File residents can vote--not because we don't like NPIOF folks, but because (stealing an idea from Kitty) only unique account real names are counted, to prevent alts and bots skewing the results. And second, the votes aren't for places, but for Events ongoing at the time the vote is cast. Why vote on one-time Events? Well, the idea is that Events will be *structured* and will count as vote-weighted In-Bound Links in new Search, both for the venue and for any Performers linked in the Event. What's a "Performer"? A resident, naturally, but one who is linked into Events. So, future Events with the same Performer or at the same Venue share in the benefit of votes cast during the current Event. And Event search is completely redone to rank by voting within timeslot--a "What's Hot Now" kind of result.
For this to work, obviously the "unique account real names" thing has to be pretty robust. Of course, violating it is already RL fraud, so folks who do so risk serious penalties, not just a 3-day suspension from a video game. If the G-Team isn't deterrence, guys with shiny badges at the RL front door might be.
And there are some venues that people should be able to find easily (you know, the usual suspects... "Svarga", for short), but that aren't about Events. I believe that these places AND ONLY THESE PLACES should be in the new Showcase. I really don't think it's all that critical to SL's growth and new resident retention that everybody be able to find out quickly the best places to buy skin and hair and poseballs and where to Mak teh Sexxys, but it *is* important that they can find the best builds and the best educational opportunities. That's all that Showcase should even consider.
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Phil Deakins
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05-03-2008 08:14
A quick reply to part of your post, Qie... I think that what you say is probably true about many people not yet knowing how make the most of their parcels/places in the new search. That would certainly be improved if the traffic-based search was completely removed - they'd be taking steps to find out how to rank well in the new search 
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Lee Lindman
Singularity Evangelist
Join date: 31 Jan 2007
Posts: 26
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05-03-2008 08:34
From: Viktoria Dovgal The new search runs on Google appliances, so the potential is already there. It maybe needs to be fed better information, so what should be added to or removed from its diet? Half of googles technology is it's crawler which it uses to locate and index the files. Googles crawler might not work so well in Second Life since parcel data != plain Jane web page data. I think this is a good argument to implement the plugin architecture for the SL viewer. Then somebody could create an open third party organization which gathers the stats via an open source plugin that all the statistics are fed into. This would ensure that when multiple distributed grids arise (OpenSim etc) that there is still stats being read on those places too and not just Second Life. Having this service as a non-profit third party organization should help make it's data more reliable and accurate, VS somebody like Alexa for web information whose results always seem to be under fire. Whenever OpenSpime ( www.openspime.com) finishes their API that technology could perhaps be built into the viewer. So the SL Viewer would be a spime essentially which gathers and aggregates data in a central, open database. Ambitious yes, but it would ensure that the public owns their data and not some company. Also OpenSpime is just such a cool technology and I think this would be a wonderful way to put it to work.
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Colette Meiji
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Join date: 25 Mar 2005
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05-03-2008 08:44
If getting rid of rankings eased database load ..
Why wouldn't getting rid of traffic numbers do the same for us?
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Colette Meiji
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Join date: 25 Mar 2005
Posts: 15,556
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05-03-2008 08:46
The Places tab should be alphabetical .. especially now that the search all has been overhauled and is based on all sorts of other junk.
It wouldn't confuse anyone new ..
"Gee I clicked places and I get an alphabetical listing of Places ... that makes sense"
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Chip Midnight
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Join date: 1 May 2003
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05-03-2008 09:20
From: Colette Meiji The Places tab should be alphabetical .. especially now that the search all has been overhauled and is based on all sorts of other junk. It wouldn't confuse anyone new Alphabetical wouldn't be bad as long as the letter of the alphabet represented on page one was random for each search. If it always started with A then we know exactly how that would work. A thousand businesses with names starting with AAAAAAAAAAAAA.
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Phil Deakins
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05-03-2008 09:22
From: Lee Lindman Half of googles technology is it's crawler which it uses to locate and index the files. Googles crawler might not work so well in Second Life since parcel data != plain Jane web page data. Actually, it does. The Google application indexes plain Jane webpages, but even if it didn't, it is written to index many different document types.
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Phil Deakins
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05-03-2008 09:25
From: Chip Midnight Alphabetical wouldn't be bad as long as the letter of the alphabet represented on page one was random for each search. If it always started with A then we know exactly how that would work. A thousand businesses with names starting with AAAAAAAAAAAAA. Anyone who starts the name of their parcel like that will lose on the All search rankings, so they'd be shooting themselves in the foot to some extent.
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Colette Meiji
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05-03-2008 09:34
From: Chip Midnight Alphabetical wouldn't be bad as long as the letter of the alphabet represented on page one was random for each search. If it always started with A then we know exactly how that would work. A thousand businesses with names starting with AAAAAAAAAAAAA. well yeah but people know those places are obviously gaming. It would be like the current traffic score based system saying something like --------------------------------------------------------------- The Widget Hut 30,000(uses trafficbots) Briarfireld farms 29,456(uses campers) Ginny's Garage 29,777
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Kagehi Kohn
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Join date: 22 Apr 2008
Posts: 56
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05-03-2008 10:40
Ok. Some more comments. 1) The new search sucks at the moment. It can't even give equivalent results to the existing one, never mine better ones. 2) We need something better for handling things. Look, we have like 3 competing stargate networks, with interoperability, so... why not set up a search system for places and shops, etc. Have each region with a central "hub" for collecting data from shopping grids. You use **basic** keywords, with one "beacon" per shop. So, if its a furry store, your keywords would be like (the second field on type is to designate if its the "original" shop, or a resale, as well as if its a single shop, or a mall): ::Type:: shop, kiosk, mall ::Name:: Luskwood Creatures ::Type of Items:: Furry Avatars ::Arrival Point:: SURL//blah/x/y/z Or, if you where some other type of location: ::Type:: RP, main, single ::Name:: Doomed Ship ::Type of Items:: Basic Scifi ::Arrival Point:: SURL//blah/x/y/z Maybe something like "how many items", but limit the keyword list to a "small" number. We already have vendor systems that track stuff this way, it seems sane to use something like that to handle searching for specific "types" of places. Someone wants traffic, then add a damn person detector/counter, which can send to the DB how many people have shown up every 24 hours. Let the beacons do immediate updates when "setting" themselves in the system, but then have the hub poll them at different times, to get updates, so they don't all spam it at one time. Then, you could not only search for the "specific" thing you want, you can also pick the "type" you want, if its the primary location, or an adjunct, etc. Mind you, some adjustment may need to be made, for shops with multiple kiosks. For a booth system this isn't a problem, since the booth renter can just drop their marker in there. For shops that just dump everything in boxes and wall hangings, you might need to have the notecard for the beacon contain a subsection: :  ther Kiosks:: blah blah2 And so on. The search would allow you to pop up a window, or go to the "main" shop location for those names. Its not likely to hurt someone looking for clothes, for example, if the mall has 10 clothes shops, and they know they can get the items from blah2 at that mall. Its certainly not going to get complaints from the "main" people, if someone can opt to go direct to them from the search. And, such a system could be *far* better at defining the search parameters. Since your limited to the number of terms you can use, some moron can't stuff 16 keywords in, causing people to jump around between 50 different places, none of which actually "have" the thing they did the search on. By limiting the number possible, you limit how much some one can "game" the system. Malls won't be effected, since most use booths and the booth renters can set the marker for them, and small shops get help, because they *actually* get listed as the "primary" source for the stuff they sell. And again, for people that want to, they can set up a counter, to track traffic, which will either show up in the list, or something like "Not tracked". Actual ranking "by" traffic would require "requesting" that it be ranked that way by the person doing the search. Same if you are looking for a shop by name, to find the "main" one, or just a mall that has it. Just tell the search to limit it to "primary" shops, or "malls". Now, how/if Linden could set up the system to handle this, is a question, but even if *their* solutions end up sucking, and so far the new "All Search" doesn't impress me, its something that *could be* run by anyone that has the skills needed to set up something similar to the stargate networks which are already in use in the world. Just means setting up a search page to go to when looking for things, which runs off the resulting DB.
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Oryx Tempel
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05-03-2008 11:08
From: Phil Deakins Yes but you know as well as I do that there is such a lot of bias amongst the people in SL, that user reviews are bound to be often biased - even personal bias. Of course they are. People are biased in RL as well. If I like a particular Indian restaurant over another, that's a bias, and I'll write it up in Zagat, giving it a better review than the other restaurant. It's a rating! Of COURSE it's going to be biased. That's the point! Now, some other person might like the second restaurant better than my restaurant, so he'll give that one a better rating than mine. It all balances out, or not, depending on which restaurant is preferred by more people.
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