BOT places! List them here!

I already all knew that.

Thats not what I meant, I meant compared to paying for placings, gaming picks is sub-optimal.

Ok, but paying for placement isn't anything to do with optimising. It's just plain advertising. But as there is no way to pay for placement in that search, we make do with what there is.

No LL just didn't give any thought whatsoever to the way classifieds would work in the new search, they brought into the whole "ooh it's Google, everyone loves google" line.

Someone above suggested a yellow pages and that's something I'd be in favour of. L$30 gets you a listing, people can sort by name, traffic or a default which when all things are equal gives the higher ranking to the person who paid more for their classified advert.

If people want to pay for a featured spot then so be it.

I was never talking about optimising search. I was talking about methods of gaining placing being comparatively optimal with each other.

To make it simpler, having bots on all the time is a hard way to get pay for placings (in effect), gaming picks is an easier way but still not as optimal as paying for your placement which LL are not offering directly.

I'd go along with that too. In practise, the problem would be LL's delays at listing submissions. It can't be automated, because it's a directory in which places must be in the correct categories. And that brings up another problem. Depending on the categories, many stores would rightly need to be listed in many categories. Could LL take the word of store owners as to which categories to include the stores in? I honestly don't think so. I can see it now - stores adding one little item per category where they want to be listed, but don't normally sell. It would need someone from LL to visit each submitted place and inspect it. Then what happens when a store genuinely adds something different? More inspections and delays. What happens when stores close down, move, take item types out, and so on? It can't be left to resident volunteers for obvious reasons. It's just not going to happen, but if it could work it would a good thing.

Yellow pages would be a better system, but my preference would be a random sort order for every search. Don't like the results the first time? Just refresh it to get a different selection. There's no way to game that and it would be a boon for new businesses trying to establish themselves. For people who want to pay for premium placement we already have classifieds.

Well we don't know that for sure, but even if true, they could have added pay for placement on top to those who wanted it I am sure, or requested that change from google.

That at least can be argued as a legitmate way of getting pay for placings. Then people would be under no illusion about it being sanctioned and intended. They may not like it and it may not be fair to everyone but at least it was designed to be that way intentionally.

I would have no problem with that as long as it was either seperate from the normal listings and/or did not drive non-featured ads into oblivion and obscurity.

Oh yes there is

They bought an off-the-shelf system from Google, so it's highly unlikey that Google would tailor it for that. But they could easily do it themselves.
It doesn't require any messing about with Google internal code to do it.

But then what do you have? You either have paid placements as far the eye can see, which would be very bad for places that can't really afford to compete up there. Or you would have a few paid placements at the top, and the influenceable listings right underneath, in front of people's eyeballs.

[added]
I've lost track of this somewhere. You were talking about the Google system. It already has paid ads in its results pages, and there's no need for any more. I thought you were still talking about the Places tab (traffic) search.

Well not really, Ciaran made the point that they just didn't think and went out and bought google. The bit you quoted was me saying that we don't know that they didn't think about it first.

I didn't know that google already had pay for placings in it so that adds even more weight to my points about if LL wanted pay for placings then they would provide it directly. Hence we can be reasonably sure they don't want pay for placings either directly, nor indirectly via bots or picks gaming.

Ah, yes. I did get lost but not in the place I'd thought

The Google system doesn't have it. What I meant was that Classifieds are displayed in the Google results pages, which are effectively paid-placings. For me, that's plenty of ads per page already.

They're working on an improved classifieds system so I think there is an understanding that this search doesn't cut the mustard for classifieds. Jeska said it would be with us in a few months, she said this a couple of months ago.

I must admit I had forgotten about classifieds. So they do provide a pay-for-placement system, it is clear then they they did not expect people to be gaming search in the way that it is gamed today with bots and picks.

You could game it, but only to be included in searches your place isn't really relevant for, and even then it would be luck of the draw as to whether you were on the first page or the last.

The fact that you've forgotten about classifieds exemplifies the problem with classifieds

Traffic was meant to be used as a way of ranking interesting places for exploration. It was not meant to be a guide to shopping.

"Traffic was put in place as a way of gauging interest in a build or location." This comes from http://secondlife.wikia.com/index.php/Traffic ; it is linked to from the Second Life Knowledge Base Article, "What is traffic (formerly known as dwell?"

Furthermore, Traffic "It replaced the Voting Stations system." Following the link to Voting Stations, it is explained that the, "voting station was used in a similar manner to dwell--a builder or property owner would put one out on their property and gain money nightly from the voting station depending on how many residents clicked it to 'cast their vote' as a way of saying 'nice job' on the build or property"

In the very next sentence is the one place anywhere in which I have found Linden Lab indicating camping as an abuse. "Due to abuse by some residents using tactics such as 'camping chairs' (chairs that you would get paid to sit in and 'dwell' on the land at the same time), along with an economic inflation, payment from traffic will be removed. However, traffic will still be used for the Find listings."

The context is not, though, that camping is an abuse because it was essentially scamming money from Linden Lab, when they had the practice of paying out money for Traffic.

In no Linden Lab article on Traffic is Traffic in any way linked to shopping.

Shopping and exploring are separate activities. Traffic is related to the "build or location." I know this because this is what Linden Lab tells me about Traffic. Shopping is not about the build or location; it is about the product. That's why I, as a consumer, do not feel deceived by a shop owner who uses camping bots.

Calling someone unethical or a lair is a strong accusation. It needs to have a much better basis than the accuser's personal preferences or subjective interpretations.

Lol perhaps, I never claimed it to be perfect though. In fact my whole premise was and is to show that there is no intent from LL for anyone to game these searches and systems in the way they are today. If that was the intent there would be a feature to replace the extensive measures that must be employed to perform said gaming of system.

Actaully making search say your place is more popular because you shove 20 bots up there to game the traffic is falsifying the data, hence lying.
Ethics *are* subjective, there are no absolutes though there can be consensus amongst a group of people.

I'm surprised that you haven't thought of it. It came to me straight away. It's not what you suggested, and it's not just the luck of the draw.

Faked traffic numbers are a lie, and those who employ them are unethical, dishonest, and predatory. I feel entirely comfortable saying that. While I respect Phil for being up front about what he does, that doesn't change the ethics of it. I think we should aspire to something more than "may the best con artist win." I'm all for healthy competition, but I respect myself and my competitors too much to resort to cheats to try to gain an advantage. That means I won't pay for traffic, won't fake traffic with bots, won't pay for picks, and won't misrepresent what I offer. If that puts me at a disadvantage, fine. I'd much rather be accused of being overly ethical than not ethical enough. YMMV.

People don't make the search say that their places are more popular. That's a fallacy. People make their places show high in a set of search results for Places, and that's all they do. The intention is to rank highly. It is not to inform anyone that a place is more popular than it is. People don't search for popularity in the Places tab. They search for places that have what they are looking for. Nobody is being deceived - and certainly not by me. I've been here long enough, openly stating that I use bots to be high in the rankings. There's nothing underhanded about it. And before anyone asks why they are so high in the sky if I'm not being underhanded, go back and read about sim resources.

I am sorry Phil but you are wrong. Traffic is the measure of how much traffic your parcel has seen, hence how popular it is. If you game that then you are making the search engine give false stats about how popular your parcel is, hence the lying.
Taking measures to make something give false information is deceiving people.

I'm not wrong, and you're missing the point. I'll repeat it. People don't make the search say that their places are more popular. They make the search rank them higher than they would otherwise be ranked. They don't do it to appear popular by any stretch of the imagination. They do it to rank highly. I should know better than anyone else here. If the ranking factor was something completely different, people would influence that instead. The idea that people could think the place is more popular than other places, doesn't even enter our heads. I'm the expert here - I should know.


And there's more...

That's the fallacy. Traffic does *not* mean popularity. It means traffic - popular and unpopular avatar minutes - and that's all. There are a great many parcels in SL, both mainland and whole private island sims, that contain different things. For instance, one of my competitors has a store and an active club on the parcel. Because of the active club, the store is seen to have more traffic than parcels that just have a store on them, but it isn't a measure of the store's traffic, or popularity, at all. It's a measure of the parcel's traffic. Anyone who thinks that the numbers in the results are measures of popularity is simply wrong.


And still more...

Here's another reason why traffic is not popularity. People go to places from search and from word of mouth, and even by accident. They look around, spend a few minutes in them, but wouldn't buy anything because it's all crap. I've done it myself. People go to places for all sorts of reasons that don't produce either sales or LMs for later, or any intention of going back. (How many people from this forum went to the skin ripper's store?) All those minutes count as traffic, but they are not 'popular' minutes - quite the opposite. For those people, those places are unpopular, and the minutes should count against the parcel and not for it. Traffic does not mean popularity.


The conclusion is that the rankings in the Places tab do *not* represent popularity at all, and people don't use the places tab to find 'popular' places (maybe with social places, but not with stores). They use the Places tab to find places that sell what they are looking for. I.e. they type an item into the searchbox, and they look through the results for that item. The numbers are irrelevant to them. The only searchers who those numbers are relevant to are the very few people who object to them being influenced, so they vote with their feet and ignore places with high numbers. There are very few such people. The SL population as a whole isn't interested in the traffic numbers.

It doesn't matter how the measure of traffic came about, or what the intention for it was. I'm talking about what the traffic numbers actually are. They are simply measures of avatars on parcels - whatever the reason - good or bad - popular or unpopular. They are *not* measures of popularity. Popularity is a positive only thing. Traffic is completely neutral.


Deception / lying:-

As we have seen, the traffic numbers are not a measure of, and do not represent, popularity. There are no figures that represent popularity. The only figures we are dealing with is traffic - the number of avatar minutes on the parcel in a 24 period. My traffic figure is entirely accurate. There is no deception. There is no lying. There is no implication that the traffic number is the measure of the store's popularity. The only claim is that that many minutes were spent by avs on the parcel. Just like the club I mentioned, the store's traffic figure in the search results does not represent any sort of popularity, or lack of it, for the store. It only represents avatar minutes on that parcel during the 24 hours. Traffic = popularity is a fallacy. The traffic numbers do not lie or deceive - the minutes actually happened - and anyone who thinks that they represent 'popularity' for a place, deceives him/herself.

To sum it up:
Traffic is not a measure of popularity. There is no inherent claim that the numbers represent a 'popular' vote. The only claim is that the avatar minutes on the parcel actually happened. There is no deception, and no lying - and no secrecy. The traffic is accurate, but it does not represent popularity.

You are wrong, and I did say in my passage that traffic means traffic but the Linden meaning of that is popularity - hence why popular places tab is the one that shows the most traffic. "Popular" places = places with most traffic.

See this is why I dislike engaging you in debate because you just can never be wrong about anything. You even expressed that you were not interested in debating this and yet you continue to post on this subject.

There are no faked traffic numbers, and no lies. See my previous post.