Test Out New Search, Delivering More Relevant, Faster Results

[Blondin Linden]

Check out the blog HERE:

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Search is a vital element in Second Life that enables you to find interesting people, places, events, items for sale, and other things to make your inworld experience more fun, collaborative, and meaningful. It has been a while since we last updated you on search and that’s because we’ve chosen to take a big leap forward versus smaller, incremental improvements. We believe that new search is a vast improvement over current search both in terms of usability and relevance. But we’re not the only ones who think that. We conducted a quiet test with a savvy group of Residents who preferred new search results over 75% of the time compared with current search results.

Now it’s time for you to test it out. Today, we have released a Search Project Viewer, that works on the main grid. Here are a few things that you’ll notice right away:

• Better Search Results User Interface: It’s not just prettier (we had to say it), but it’s also much more usable. Our new search engine considers Second Life specific data, such as how many people are at an event versus web-based data, so search results are more relevant and less subject to spam. And, now search results are compiled on a single scrollable page instead of several pages that require multiple clicks to see. You can even view multiple search results at one time by expanding results!
• Delivers More Relevant Results: The new search engine also serves more relevant results than the current search technology, based on four rounds of double-blind testing. And, we’ll always continue to test and tweak the results to ensure that you find what you’re looking for.
• To Buy or Rent? That is the Question.: The land sales category has been revamped, separating sales and rentals and giving you better options to limit your search by price range and land size. Now, it’s much easier to find that perfect place to settle in Second Life.
• Find Out What’s Happening Now: You can also search Events by either the exact start time or ”happening now,”  but might have started earlier. That way, you can quickly find out what’s happening in Second Life right now.
• Search Results Are Saved: Many of you have shared with us how you use search to discover your world and shop, and how you want your search results saved. We’ve all had this experience. We search for something, find an interesting event or place to go shopping, and then want to go back to our search results and find another place to go--but they are gone. When using the new Search, results are saved for 15 minutes so that you can easily go back and explore other options.

Take a look at this video and see for yourself.

For those who want more details, the Search Project Viewer FAQ explains the test process and the search terms that landowners will need to use when listing their land for sale or rent.

One of the first questions many will have is, “Will new search work in Viewer 1.23 and Third-Party Viewers?”  New search will soon be available to you in the official SL Viewer and we will not be implementing it for the 1.23 Viewer. To be clear, you can still use the 1.23 Viewer, but search functionality will be impaired once new search is released into general availability, after the test period. (We cannot speak to which Third-Party Viewers will adopt the new search technology.) All of our development efforts are focused on making SL Viewer with Basic and Advanced modes exceptional for all Residents--new and seasoned.

So, test out new search using the Search Project Viewer that makes finding cool people, places, and things in Second Life easier than ever before.



[Lexie Linden]

Just want to point out there is a feedback option at the top of the Search viewer!  Please use that to give the search team your thoughts!  Thanks!!

[Yoki Enoch]

After over a year of the release of Viewer 2.x, it please me to see that it is suggested here that this viewer may actually even have a search function now. I shan't ask why it took so long, but I will wait to see what the community says about the "new search" function for Viewer 2.x. If it is even close to good, who knows, I may try to use Viewer 2.x again. But if I do, it will be with much, much trepidation. Four tries within a year really is my limit, ya know.

[Ann Otoole]

Crashes on startup. crash logger cannot connect to server to send logs. This is common for nightly builds.

Has this been unit tested on windows or is this another one of those deals that only works on linux?

 

Now i'll go uninstall all LL viewers to and reinstall the beta viewer that works.

 

Oh wait. I think I see the issue. A programmer assumed the cache was in the default location and hard coded it instead of looking to see where cache is in preferences from previous installs.

2011-05-25T18:13:34Z INFO: LLTextureCache::purgeAllTextures: Deleting files in directory: C:\Users\(user name ommitted)\AppData\Local\SecondLife\texturecache\0
2011-05-25T18:13:34Z llvfs/lldiriterator.cpp(58) : error
2011-05-25T18:13:34Z ERROR: LLDirIterator::Impl::Impl: Invalid path: "C:/Users/(user name ommitted)/AppData/Local/SecondLife/texturecache/0"

The expected directory structure does not exist. So the program fails on startup.

[Gooden Uggla]

Interesting... only a year and a half after "fixing" search, it becomes yet another avenue for forcing a still not-ready V2 upon a customer base that has avoided it like the plague. Congratulations!

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello. I downloaded and installed the Seach Project Viewer. I try it now and i have 2 questions:

1) Why we haven't any mention about the traffic when we search for places? Is it possible to be added this option? I believe that is very useful maybe more than the size of a region or club for example (sq m2).

2)Why we can't sort our results? If i remember right, we had that option in older versions of Viewer 2.

Thank you.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Search alone isn't enough to prompt me to switch to Viewer 2.x, but i do hope you manage to get it right this time. If the search engine isn't right, it doesn't matter what the people coding viewers do. (Though i hope you have a properly documented API.)

I'll stick with Phoenix and wait for Firestorm 

[Jimbo Mimulus]

More Junk.

 

What happened to this ?

 

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/Back-to-Basics-Technology-Improvements/ba-p/668918

New Chat Service Coming Soon
We’re  finally going to tackle the group chat problem that has been a Resident  complaint for a long time. Group chat can often be confusing, with  “chat lag” causing responses to appear late, or sometimes not at all.  You should start to see real improvements in this early next year. Over  the last few months, we’ve completed a number of development sprints to  prototype an XMPP service and have decided to move forward with an ejabberd deployment.  We’re targeting to have a test deployment of the new group chat service  by the end of this year, and full production deployment in early 2011.

 

Early 2011 ? ... we're nearing halfway through 2011, and STILL no news on this much needed feature.

another disappointment from the people who bring you failed teleports & failed logins

[Stickman Ingmann]

You say that 1.23-based search will be inpaired when this becomes the official search method. Please defined "impaired." Will 1.23-based search simply receive no updates and if it breaks will not be fixed? Will it be taken down so search in 1.23 will simply not work?

Feedback: Searching Everything for "Stickman" returns a fairly new alt account of mine, Stickman Resident, followed by some relevant results. To avoid confusion, the account name is "Stickman" and I have set the display name to "Stickman Resident." I stop seeing immediately visible relevance at "Aurican's Pyramid Store," the the seventh result. But it might be that the parcel is owned by a person or group with Stickman in the name.

The user account "Stickman Ingmann," which is what caused results 3, 4, and 5 to show up, is not listed on the first page. The owner of the sixth result, Stickman Stilman, also doesn't show up.

I'm guessing that only one user account is shown in the Everything search and then a couple groups, and then the rest is a dump of places. I would argue that this isn't the best method and that how many results of each type are shown should be weighted based on the relevance of the results.

To find more relevant user accounts, you will likely want to have more statistics you can pull from. Someone who logs in a lot, owns land with more picks to it, changes their profile often, etc, will more likely be a relevant search result than a close name match.

[Eboni Khan]

It crashes on startup. It won't connect to send a crash log. I delete cache and all setting manually and it will not start.

I run Kirsten Viewer and other versions of V2 with no issues at all.

[Jori Watler]

Same for me - clean install, cache clear, system reboot, program start, initializing/detecting hardware - instant CRASH - will not send logs.

[Ann Otoole]

---

Eboni Khan wrote:

It crashes on startup. It won't connect to send a crash log. I delete cache and all setting manually and it will not start.

I run Kirsten Viewer and other versions of V2 with no issues at all.

---

Ah so I am not alone. This same issue exists on the builds that have the mesh code in them too. I do hope LL corrects this before wiping out a large number of customers lol.

[Void Singer]

::has no plans to run it if it won't obey cache location::

[Persephone Emerald]

After reading the OP, I thought, "Cool. I'd like to try this."  Then I remembered that official LL posts always sound overly optimistic.

IMO, the posts from people who have tried the new product or features are a better indicator of whether it's worth trying of not.  After trying Viewer 2 left me with folders I don't want & can't get rid of for my main account, no matter what viewer I'm using, I maintain a policy of not using any LL product until it's been out for a least a month & has had all its bugs exposed by other brave souls who are willing to try it.

I'd really like to try this out, but I'm not yet willing to risk the possible headache of using a LL viewer.

[Eboni Khan]

I install SL to my D Drive so if what you are saying about the coding being for C alone, that is the issue.

[Vick Forcella]

Not intending to use the Pré-pre-Beta viewer but I found the link on Tateru her blog to give it a test run.

Feels intuitive but big and webby. Results appear accurate but with parcel spamming you can get a high score (probably also for the Beta that is implemented in Beta2).

Finding places where people are that have the same interest appears to be more accurate. I am missing sorting on Traffic when searching in Places. That is a Must Ad function.

I suggest to make the ads a bit more optional. A click on >> (similar to Hide Filters) should make them go away since it clogs up the screen (even more). As a paying customer I need to see an option to make ads go away completely from the viewer.

Challenge and natural follow-up: Include SLM

Overall, looks much better as V2 and a whole lot bigger and a bit less functional as 1.23. Include 1.23 functions, size and speed and you have something that I would love to see in any TPV.

[Nicolette Lefevre]

Is there a way to restrict a search to specific maturity levels? I mean apart from the Preferences-setting?

Like is there a way to search for Adult content only? If there is, then I can't seem to find it.

[Cerise Sorbet]

---

Stickman Ingmann wrote:

You say that 1.23-based search will be inpaired when this becomes the official search method. Please defined "impaired." Will 1.23-based search simply receive no updates and if it breaks will not be fixed? Will it be taken down so search in 1.23 will simply not work?

---

Hi, It is only really vanilla LL 1.23 that won't have a way out of this predicament, TPVs can adapt. it is the "All" and "Group" tabs that won't have web pages to go to any more. At least one of the TPVs, Cool VL Viewer, still has the very old pre-Web group tab, other TPVs might borrow that for a while, or rewire the All tab to use the new search system. Most of the 1.x based TPVs are built on top of later versions of Snowglobe, so they have Webkit and there is a good chance that they can be made reasonably compatible with the new search pages, They could need a few secondlife:// hooks added too, so that the web links have somewhere to go.

[Eboni Khan]

It won't run on my Desktop with the better specs, but it runs on my cheap laptop.

[Blondin Linden]

The problem has been escalated. Hoping to get it fixed. Just to be clear, there is no search code in the viewer.

[Gavin Hird]

Had an quick run and first impression is on the positive side.

I sent the feedback that we need to be able to set maturity prefs with check boxes as those are filters relevant for individual searches. It is fine to pick up the Prefs setting as the default, but people will want to change these actively when searching.

I also noticed that profiles clicked from search came up in the sidebar and not in web format. That may of course just be a glitch in the programming, but I could not miss how snappy that was compared to the web profile. 

[Yoki Enoch]

Well, after a few hours, the brave of the community have tried it out. Needless to say and considering the feedback, I will wait longer, probably much, much longer to try this thing out, if ever. So long.

[Shep Korvin]

---

Jimbo Mimulus wrote:

What happened to this ?

New Chat Service Coming Soon

 

 

---

Somewhat off-topic, but, I believe the answer is pretty much this:

http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2011/04/21/linden-lab-abandons-xmpp-replacement-for-second-life-messaging-again/

:matte-motes-crying:

 

[thelibrarian1953]

I tried the viewer and yes it crashed on the first attempt. Was about to reply here about the problem but decided to give it a second try. The viewer logged me in second time with no problem at all. I like the new Search so far and the fact that it saves previous seasrches for 15 minutes. I was once a hater of Viewer 2, but Firestorm eased me into using it earlier this year, as did Kirstens viewer, and now I use  the Linden Viewer 2 all the time. I just wish the Linden Viewer had the shorter Sidebar as default that the Starlight skins give me and why oh why can't they get rid of the mini location bar. Please put the location details up on the top bar and free up just a little more viewer window.

[Qie Niangao]

I'm very glad to see that, indeed, "Search Results are Saved" across teleports, without that dopey "Go to last query" thing.  That's a big deal to me. 

On the downside, it's very significantly slower to load than the previous V2 search (initially, or if one presses "Search Home" to back out of a result set).  I suspect it's preloading a bunch of those scrolling classifieds, or maybe all the apparatus to make the scroll.  Anyway, something is sure taking a long time.

And I'm very disappointed that the full search page for the parcel isn't shown anywhere, with the "Go" buttons one gets for individual item destinations, as with search.secondlife.com.  That was a big improvement when "web search" (GSA) came into Viewer 1, and a big disappointment to see it missing from Viewer 2.  Is there any way we can get that back, or at a minimum, an "open in your browser" to see the actual result item somewhere, instead of the abbreviated version that shows currently?

As best I can tell, the problem of "for sale to individuals" Mainland parcels being included in the results is fixed.  The "Type" terminology is very odd, though: "Mainland - Full Region" and "Mainland - Auctions"... unless this means that the plan is to migrate most private sales to some auction process (or... something).

Still need to play a lot more with it.  It's frustrating because the bugs introduced with the Mesh merge, having nothing to do with Search, are making it really crashy and hard to use for very long.