BOT places! List them here!

Well at least gaming by picks doesn't require the bot to be online .
Seeing eveything can be gammed we nee either no system at all, just show places in random order. O r a system dsigned to be gammed where people just type in whatever traffic they feel they deserve.

Exactly. It's alredy being done, so removing traffic-only search won't bring anything new. It's highly unlikey that anyone who uses bots and/or camping, isn't already doing it.

Absolutely true.
This is why gaming of Search as a general practice should be ARable. That covers all current and future means of gaming.
Concentrating on specific abuses is only playing whack-a-mole.

Now that sounds like a good idea. I wonder how long it would take the bot-runners to come up with a workaround?

Not long at all. That's a central piece of the Lindens' overall musings of bots.. it isn't possible to distinguish between a bot logging in and a viewer logging in. And with the viewer being open source, it never will be.

The problem I see with that is, what constitutes the gaming of search? E.g. naming items for sale in such a way that it helps in the search is technically gaming, and there are many other things like that, but there's no way they can be outlawed. It would need specific practises to be layed down, and then people would work around them.

The bottom line is that there is no such thing as an uninfluencable search engine - there never has been and there never will be. As long as search engines rank things according to specific criteria, they are influencable. The only known solution to it is a human-edited directory and, even then, there is the issue of the order in which the items are listed in the pages.

What Zaphod said, plus my "not long at all". I already log my bots in on normal viewers quite often. Who needs a workaround?

This so reminds me of the time Michi Lumin shot down Jamie Bergman's endless ravings about 'free enterprise'. Go, Damianos!

Exactly. Models increase traffic, so do store assistants and so does having your workshop area on the same parcel as your store.

Whatever they come up with, someone is going to cry foul.

Traffic is used to game placement in search.

If it's not important to have high traffic numbers since people want to buy products.. why do you do it?

I've answered that before too. I do it to get my place and products in front of more people's eyes that they would otherwise be.

Example:
Someone is looking for a couch, so they want to see what's available - to see if they like something. If they don't find your place, they'll never know if they like what you have, or not. The thing is that a person will like a fair number of couches, and may buy one before they get down the list and go to your place. So it helps business to try and make sure that they see yours, and that's done by being ranked as high up the list as you can get.

It's a perfectly normal thing to do, and one that is encouraged by RL search engines. SL is not a utopia in isolation - it's part of the real world, and RL practises apply here.

On using bots for models and such....

We've seen in many threads that those who object to my sort of bot use, happily accept bots being used as manequins and such, even though they give false traffic figures. The fact that just one model, 24 hours a day, increases a place's traffic by anything up to hundreds of percent, doesn't matter. So on the one hand, the objectors find false traffic figures to be wholly acceptable, but on the other hand they find them to be cheating. Very odd. Maybe they accept false traffic as long the bots aren't intended for increasing traffic. But then, how can they say that false traffic scams and preys on the searchers, when the use of manequins and such, for whatever reason, has exactly the same effect? Very odd indeed. So inconsistent.

I don't have anything to add to the topic of bots, but I do have this one thing to say about the above quoted, Phil: your waving money about like that in the earlier post made me, even though I've never met you and had no previous good or bad opinion of you, think... well, I'll be polite and say I now have an opinion of you, and it's a lot less of a one than I might have formed had I met you inworld and chatted with you. And that's coming from someone who didn't throw insults and whom the original comments were not aimed at. It comes simply from an outside observer.

It was your move and you chose to make it, true, and I'm sure you don't give a stuff what I or anyone else thinks of you, but it was a poor move. But then, all's fair in business and it's pretty obvious that you don't mind what others think of you.

Just sayin', and have a good one

I'm sorry that you took it that way but, not knowing me, you didn't really have any choice. I chose to do it to get up their noses, knowing full well what it would look like.

You have a good day too

Really LL should remove search for stores and replace it with a "yellow pages" it bugs me when I try and search for "Random_Item_01" and I get a list of stores that dont even sell the item... but when I port to one there's a store across the street that isnt on the list who does....

There should be a "Furniture" page that lists every store that sells "Furniture" and make it so if a store owner wants they can have a "premium add" with a larger listing or whatever.

I think that actual residents cause more instability than bots - afterall, there are more of them.

I propose that we ban all avatars that do things we disapprove of, or don't do things we approve of, in order to improve grid performance for ourselves and the people we do approve of.

lolololololol @ Conan - a SL with only bots? lolol that might be interesting hehehehe

Maybe you need to back away a bit. I am anti-bot when they impact experiences, such as if the camper bots were sitting in the night club itself. The major fallacies to your arguments are IMO as follows:

'Traffic' is not only an uncertain metric in application, residents probably have widely varying expectations of what it means. If everyone pretty much knows that the high traffic counts include bots, then it is part of the general understanding and using bots is not dishonest. Maybe you mean that Phil hides what he does when he speaks on the forums? Say what?

If some people use it as the sole deciding attribute to actually go and buy, then how much protection do you build in to save fools and their hard won fractions of pennies/L$? Personally, I am far, far more bothered by those that include search tags that do not correlate to any part of the sim (Gor! BDSM! Medieval! Furries! Elves! Munchkins! Dorothies Red slippers!, and the sim is store selling hats).

Cheating? Cheating requires that rules be broken. What rule has been broken? Look, I have a real life web site that helps pay my bills, and I worry at the ghost site on my home server to find ways to pull in search hits. I don't misrepresent what I do, but if there is a trick that pulls in more potential customers to my site, I'll do it, because what I do, I do well.

Unfair? Fairness is a great topic for an ethics class. SL and LL can only be impartial and there is no call even in ethics that you be 'fair' to your competitors, which are those actually being dealt with in any way 'unfairly'. If the products are displayed properly in store and the transaction is conducted properly, the customer is treated fairly. You are expected to be fair to your vendors, your creditors and your customers, but business ethics don't require 'fairness' to your competitors. Frankly, I am more irritated by vending machines with product discriptions that don't list prim counts. Not that I will use one anymore, but in my first days I wasted my money most on items that looked simple and had actual prim counts beyond their value in use.

I liked the old camping sites with 'real' avatars that sat around and chatted, but based on what I've read here, if they keep the bots out of sight unless needed and set them up properly, then they can use them with my semi-blessings - no skin off my nose.

Come now! There must be SOME people we don't disapprove of!

Surely!

"what constitutes the gaming of search?"
Misrepresentation, that's what.

Describing a product/service accurately isn't gaming.
Describing it accurately in a way thought to suit a given search engine isn't gaming.

The gaming comes in when there is an attempt to *dishonestly* influence a search engine.
Traffic bots are an obvious dishonesty.
Ditto with camping.
Ditto with buying/renting Picks
Ditto with putting non-relevant keywords up in front of the the indexing.
Ditto with key-word labelling and indexing prims not actually for sale
Ditto with a range of dishonesty.

There isn't a requirement for specific practices to be described. There is no court of law in SL. It's quite in order for LL to state that gaming of the Search is a TOS violation, and without having to list specific dishonesties.

A court in RL isn't permitted to work on a 'know it when I see it" basis. The letter of specific laws have be proven to be broken. Lawyers can operate in a moral vacuum when representing clients. The specific letter of the law and procedural rules are the thing, and not the overall principles.
It's quite feasible for LL to look at something and say "what you are doing is gaming Search. Stop or we will remove you from the index."

Laying down specific rules in this area is just an invitation to the morally bankrupt to find ways around the specifics of the rules, and to ignore the general principles that gave rise to the rules in the first place.


LL could list some examples of the kind of practices that are not allowed, purely for illustrative purposes to aid the morally slow. They could make it clear that this is not a comprehensive list.

If camping is advertised on a parcel and camping is available and not full of camping bots ran by the parcel owner, I fail to see the dishonesty. Advertised service, being used, is not dishonest.

Ditto with buying/renting and swapping picks with your friends and business partners.

Keyword labelling falls into the bracket of utilising the tools available to promote your service, if the names in the label aren't on the parcel then that's dishonest. Putting products for sale in a store into the description of the store building is not being deceitful.

Non-relevant keywords is being dishonest.

I agree with that. It's a gimmick, certainly, but it's a genuine exchange of value for value, and the traffic generated from it is actual traffic, even if other people are sending bots there to take advantage of the parcel owner. That's something the parcel owner can't control. Traffic bots are a different beast that serve only one purpose - to deceive.

Cherry-picking you are

The dishonesty is not in the "We have camping". The dishonesty lies in the use of camping to increase traffic. It matters not if the campers are bots from an army or are individual people who park an avatar there and go off to do something else.
I've seen many places where the camping system has the anti-bot and anti-idle options disabled. I've seen places where the camping system demands an action only on sitting despite having an option to reprompt at intervals. These are clear cases where the operator knows that the campers are not warm bodies sitting at keyboards.
That sort of camping system is a clear attempt to subvert the Traffic mechanism.
Even a 'genuine' camping system for warm bodies is on the wrong side of borderline. The intent is to inflate traffic scoring, and not to give money to random avatars.




The dishonesty comes in when the Picks are obtained on an organised reward system, or are obtained via an army of accounts owned or for hire.
Common sense indicates that the intentions of the scoring via Picks was that these indicated genuine votes and not purchased ones.




I'm not sure that anyone has queried proper keyword labelling of items or parcels.
What has been queried is the labelling of a number of non-sale prims purely in an attempt to spam the indexing system.




Most people would agree with that.


If people want to buy ranking, then they should do so openly and honestly. The search results should clearly distinguish bought ranking from other ranking. That was one of the reasons behind Google's popularity.



The goal of a decent search system is to deliver relevancy, avoiding as far as possible attempts by people to subvert the system.

Except Duct Tape.

FaTeke

Sling:

I didn't suggest that there aren't any ways to game the search. My point was that one person's gaming is another person's totally above board action, as you can see in the posts following yours. I don't mind at all if LL outlaws gaming the search - I was one of the most vocal to get rid of the traffic search - remember? But they can't simply state that gaming the search it outlawed, because there are so very many grey areas. To outlaw it would need specific actions to be layed down and outlawed, such as traffic bots, paying for Picks, and such.

Camping is a major grey area, as the previous posts indicate. I think that some people put camping pads up to help people, which is perfectly good, but we all know that almost all camping is for the traffic numbers (even if it does help some people), which some of you say is definitely not good. It's very grey, isn't it? And that's one of the major ways of gaming search, but there are so very many minor ones too, all of which can be done genuinely, or to improve the rankings.

You might have missed it, but it's not many weeks ago that I called for a statement from LL that using bots to improve search rankings is no longer allowed. That was what I called for if they weren't going to get rid of the traffic-only rankings, which I also called for, and it would have got rid of the bots at a stroke. What did you call for at the time they were asking about traffic? You might have been very vocal - I don't remember. I'm just asking.

One more thing. Don't ever think that doing things to improve search rankings is wrong. Don't ever think that, or you'd be thinking against the *entire* web - including *all* the search engines.