Good morning everyone,

At the end of last year we began the task of moving Marketplace search to an up-to-date version of ElasticSearch, the application we use to do full text searches.  We apologize for some of the bumps you may have experienced in the last few weeks as we make this transition.

The Marketplace search backend was showing its age. We’ve upgraded the technology and we’ve dusted off both our indexing and searching filters. We were running ElasticSearch version 2.3 and needed to update to ElasticSearch version 8.4.  Our goal was to bring Marketplace search results closer to web search and make page loads faster, in order to improve your shopping and selling experience.

In practical terms this means:

• Merchant and store names won’t be included in product-specific searches anymore, increasing the number of relevant results
• We’ve added the ability to do exact matches with quotes around a word or phrase
• You can do asterisk(*) wildcard searches
• Fuzzy matching will help with misspelled words and typos
• Search operators AND, OR, NOT will still work as before. (Note that they must be capitalized. Consult the tooltip next to keyword search for more information.)

We received a number of reports about these issues:

• A bug with how relevance of search results is determined. This bug has been fixed.
• The search results page was displaying an inaccurate count of matching items. Search is returning the same number of matching item as before, but the count may say “10,000+”

We hope this ElasticSearch upgrade will improve everyone’s Marketplace experience. However, we are continuing to fine-tune. If you find that Marketplace search isn’t working the way you’d expect, please let us know! We may very well be able to address your issue.

An example of specific, helpful reporting might be, “I searched for ‘unicorn’, I expected ‘unicorn unicorn unicorn’ in the first page of results, but instead I got ‘horse costumes’.”

From all of us on the Second Life Web team, thank you for your patience and understanding. Happy shopping and selling!