HELP!! Search Entries are senseless???

Hi there!

Sorry if there is an existing topic about that! Ive been searching for a whihle but i coulndt find one.

Ok my problem is the following. Ive got 3 Shops where i sell things ive created. In the land properties ive set up a lot of search words for them. now if i do a search on the most important keywords i cant find any single place of mine. (search under "all" ive tried a lot of changes but it wont work. they are just found somewhere under "places" only the really most unimportant keywords are found under "all". there are other shops with lower traffic who can be found there there are also some words which did work some days before and now they are gone too. since im completely cut of from that i can give up soon. can somebody tell me how that is caused ? really disappointed from the game now

thx for any help!

I posted this exact problem yesterday in this thread:
/142/8e/174025/1.html

It seems that the update has caused all Mature checkboxes in Search to be unchecked. Therefore places or shops on Mature land (Mainland e.g.) don't show up in Search anymore, unless the user actively checkes the boxes again in categories All and Places. But most people don't even know the existence of these checkboxes.

I have the exact problem as you have. My sales have dropped to almost nothing since the update, because my shop can't be found in the default Search (with Mature boxes unchecked). In the meantime I have placed a Classified for my shop, because Classifieds always turn up in Search. I suggest you do the same for now and hope for the best.

Even with the Classified my sales are still way more down than they were in the past few months. But at least my shop can be found again. But this update 'feature' has really pissed me off. A very very bad performance from LL towards shop owners.

I can only second that, a really bad move.

I can understand regular users not bothering to keep up on blog posts, but if you run any kind of business on SL I don't see why you wouldn't.

What does it help when the business owners know about it - the potential customers have to know about it! And most of them are what you call "regular users", who don't know what impact that little checkbox has. Not even places like "Inner Child Depot", with no mature content at all, are to find without checking the checkbox.

Because this post, and others, isn't about not being able to find any random place, but the poster's own store. If they had read the blog, they would have known this was going to happen close to two weeks ago and at the very least voiced an opinion on the blog, or attempted to pressure LL into holding off on the change until they implement the "non-mature on mature" feature they hinted at in the last paragraph, or prepared for it in some other way.

I read the blog on a daily basis, but missed this paragraph. At least now I know that this new 'feature' was done intentionally.

But it is still odd that SL is supposed to be 18+, but options for mature content are suddenly unchecked by default for the users. Besides that, it is ridiculous that normal shops on Mature land are considered to have Mature (that is: sexual) content. I sell hammocks, for Pete's sake!

Linden promises 'a more granular parcel-level mature identifier in the near future'. Well, we all know that the near future usually is way way ahead.

Just because a person IS an Adult, it doesn't mean they want to see certain content in their search. The change was posted on the blog, that's fine for me. I didn't happen to notice it either. Like someone stated arlir, if you are a business owner, several trips a day to the blog and this forum should be a habit, or for any user for that matter. While the Providers are not stellar in communicating, a lot of times when something goes awry for me. a quick look at the blog usually give me an idea what's happening.

I saw the notice when it was first posted, and my initial reaction was agreement with Brenda. Some of the "mature" ads are incredibly skanky (explicit photos of RL women providing "services" to their clients). When I'm looking for a chair, I really don't want to have to wade through photos of oral sex.

I tried a test search on my ads this morning and didn't see a problem in the conventional viewer. By searching in All, with the Mature checkbox NOT checked, my store still showed up. The store is on mature land.

So does the new viewer conduct a different kind of search in addition to not checking the Mature box?

well ok ill have a look to that problem in detail. but i guess that update isnt the problem. in two of the shops i dont sell any "mature" content. only in one. i dont regard shoes or clothing as mature in any way ? or am i wrong. the shops all reside on mature land. but they still come up in search for the most unimportant search terms.
ill give an example. i have avatar, vehicles, furniture, shoes, lingerie and some other words in the keyword list. when i search for avatar or furniture its in the listing. but not for shoes and lingerie. as my main focus is on shoes atm (i made a lot of them) this makes me really mad. mature checkboxes are not the problem i guess. (i always have them checked btw)
anyways big thanks for your answers so long!

While I think this is a valid point, I think it is also important to recognize three things:

1) Protesting something on the blog has had almost no effect on Linden Lab's decision making process (this isn't universally true, but mostly true).

2) The only practical solution to this problem, for business owners on the mainland that happen to have their store in a mature region, is to move their store to a PG region.

3) That really sucks.

Yesterday my sales dropped to 25% of their normal level. When I figured out what had happened this morning, I changed my region to PG and sales have already picked up. Unfortunately, for the majority of business owners - not having their own region or the ablity to change their rating - they are in some real trouble with this.

I would posit that the value of mature land is in question now.

And I would add, before Linden Lab made this change, they should have actually done the following, which their blog says they will do at some point in the future:

ok its me again ive checked all three places again. they all reside in mature regions. thats not the problem for me. i can find all of them with mature content active. but why the hell i cant find them under "SHOES" damn grml sh... i really get mad! i have shoes in descriptions and name of all three places. i cant find them anywhere. same for other words. its really disgusting! i also tried to set one place to "no mature" actually there is no mature content sold there, just sexy outfits. but that also didnt help in any way. its like a shoe mafia is keeping me off from search. plz help me on that problem

If you read the comments (I mostly skimmed so I may have missed one) there wasn't really anyone protesting that it would hurt their sales. I don't believe an angry mob would have made much of a difference, but noone really spoke out against it from the business sense (there are a few personal opinions though).

Each parcel already has a separate Mature checkbox that the land owner can (un)check, it's just currently of no use (historical reasons?).

If search was changed to simply use the parcel rating, rather than the sim rating then the whole issue would be solved, and I don't think it would really be all that much work either. Just a change in the search query on the database end.

In a perfect world I guess it would be nice to filter by actual content sold, but I don't see how. A shop could decide to sell an "Adult" item one day, or to stop selling it. I don't see how that can be tracked effectively for searching purposes.

That proves my point. Many SL-users don't know the Mature checkboxes and therefore have no clue that search is limited to PG by default now. I too see sales picking up again, because I had to place a Classified in order to show up in the default search. It isn't on normal daily level, though.

That checkbox is for advertising on the SL-website and has nothing to do with setting Mature or PG on your land.

I haven't downloaded the new viewer yet, but this truly does stink. My main store is in a mature region, and I'm glad that I have classifieds and a small annex store in a PG region so my business might still have a chance of being found.

I wonder if we'll see a surge in value in current PG land? I hope that LL will release more PG land if their intent is to clean up the grid. Personally, I'll be looking to move my main store to a PG region in the not too distant future so I don't have to be next to a sex bondage place anymore.

Okay, this is a shot in the dark, but I felt like such a noob when I finally figured out this particular search interface display feature....

Search for shoes will bring back a VERY long list of results. If it's longer than one page, you will have to click a button to see the next page.

And get this, each page can be sorted to display an alphbetized list but only *within the group of rankings*. So you can see a store name beginning with Z at the bottom of the first page, but there are STILL more pages. You're not at the end of the entire search results list, just the end of the highest ranking stores on that specific page.

So try your search results again, then check to see if your store falls on a subsequent page.

Not only that, but searching for shoe and shoes will get different results. That's not likely to be a problem for shoe, since it's unusual for anyone to use the singular in this context. But it is a problem for other search terms.