Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world

[Medhue Simoni]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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One other thing that could add a little to this would be the scale factor.

Everything everyone builds gets scaled up to accomodate for the so called "oversized (too tall) Avatar."

If the base or center line is set shorter then a lot of furniture, cars, etc. will simply appear to be too big.

I know a couple of girls in the 'real hight' crowd who have a terrible time with motorcycles.  Some motorcycle creators are using resize scripts right now but no matter what they do they can't reach the handle bars.  If they up their Ava's from 5'6" to 7'6", the problem goes away.

So using builds designed for SL could require some tweaking.

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Something the women might want to ask their motorcycle creators to do, is create an invisible prim for people to sit on. Then, they can adjust the position of that invisible prim without moving anything on the bike. Just to keep things a little more simple for people, I like to create 2 options, a male and female option. Of course, this doesn't make it perfect, and every1 is a different size, but at least they have 2 options to choose from. Of course, I choose this option because I can easy make the different animations changes they might need.

[Perrie Juran]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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One other thing that could add a little to this would be the scale factor.

Everything everyone builds gets scaled up to accomodate for the so called "oversized (too tall) Avatar."

If the base or center line is set shorter then a lot of furniture, cars, etc. will simply appear to be too big.

I know a couple of girls in the 'real hight' crowd who have a terrible time with motorcycles.  Some motorcycle creators are using resize scripts right now but no matter what they do they can't reach the handle bars.  If they up their Ava's from 5'6" to 7'6", the problem goes away.

So using builds designed for SL could require some tweaking.

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Something the women might want to ask their motorcycle creators to do, is create an invisible prim for people to sit on. Then, they can adjust the position of that invisible prim without moving anything on the bike. Just to keep things a little more simple for people, I like to create 2 options, a male and female option. Of course, this doesn't make it perfect, and every1 is a different size, but at least they have 2 options to choose from.

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Most motorcycles have positioning scripts for where you sit.

To reach the handle bars they have to sit on the gas tank.

It's not as bad with creators who do female versions but the problem is still there.

I could be wrong but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't  long before the "real hight" crowd starts harping on LL about this.  It's a hot button topic for them.

[Phil Deakins]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Well, I kind of hate that we are having this conversation, but I really can't back down because I know you are wrong. It's nonsensical to think that traffic was the only metric. You conceded that keywords in descriptions were used. They would have to be used, so what I said is exactly right. The more land you owned the more keywords you had.

Picks were also another factor in the old search, until about 6 months before LL switched to GSA. They took Picks out of the equation because of some obscure Pick that associated some1's land with Nazis. At least, that was the reason LL gave us. In order for Picks to be part of the equation, the user had to have PIOF, so not all Picks were counted. Despite this, scammers got merchants to pay for Picks, which didn't help them at all. I had a ton of people with Picks of my store, as I gave a free product to any1 that put a Pick of my store in their profile.

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You are remembering it very wrong. Do what I suggested in the "Here's proof" paragraph. The answer is still there for all to see, and it's irrefutable.

No no no no no. You didn't get any more keywords for owning bigger parcels. You got the same number of words in every parcel. The only way to get more was, and still is, to have multiple parcels. You probably meant multiple parcels, anyway

 

Pre-GSA

Keywords were never a ranking factor. You had to use keywords to get into the set that got ranked, but that's all that keywords did. Just one would do it. Once you were in the set, you were ranked solely on traffic. It's still there and you can see it for yourself. If you really think that land size had anything at all to do with it, please explain to me why the places were, and still are, ranked numerically in traffic order. See for yourself, and then please explain where land size can possibly come into it. You can't seriously believe that it's coincidence that the results are in traffic order - every single time. It's not even worth discussing because it's still there for all to see, and you can see it for yourself. Please look. In fact, there's a button with the word 'Traffic' on it. Clicking it list the results numerically from the bottom up. Clicking it again lists them from the top down. All traffic numbers. Nothing else. Please look and you'll see. It's no good arguing about it if you don't look.

 

Picks were never a ranking factor of either the original search or the GSA. However...

 

GSA

People used Picks for the GSA, and people paid for them too, not because Picks were in any way a ranking factor, but because people's profiles have web pages, and the Picks in those profile pages were linked to the places that they picked. It's those links that were very effective. The two most powerful ranking factors in the GSA were page Titles (which are parcel names) and links to the place's page. Picks provided many links to a place's page and so it moved way up in the rankings because of them.

After a while, LL stopped putting those Picks links in profile pages, because they were being used to affect the rankings. That's why Picks became no good for rankings. They also filtered out HTML from other parts, such as place names and descriptions, because it was being used to put links in those places to get higher rankings for the places they linked to. I discovered and used that myself, along with other methods.

You knew that Picks were effective with the GSA because you paid for them with gifts. What you didn't know was why they were effective. You do now

A bit more... It wasn't that people had to have PIOF for the Picks links to be effective. It was that, without PIOF, people didn't have webpages for the Picks links to be on.

Through most of the time that the GSA was running, i was in regular contact with LL's search team leader, and we shared information. So I know much more about what they were doing, and why, than either LL told us or people guessed at. However, I knew the Google ranking factors long before I ever joined SL - it was my business, and I was well-known in the world in that business - so my contact gained me nothing in that respect.

 

An aside (almost)

During the GSA period, I split my store into about half a dozen smallish parcels, each for a department/section; e.g. outdoors. Some were just a couple of k in size. I optimised each for its product type, and I got them all at the top of the rankings by my knowledge. Small land sizes didn't keep them down. In fact, with one parcel I actually tried to lower its ranking for a particual searchterm because it was too high for that one. It didn't belong at all in those particular results.

 

I'm sorry, Medhue, but you are wrong about land size. Please do as I suggested in the "Here's proof" paragraph. It's irrefutable. Your memory or assumption is wrong. I will grant that later in the GSA period, after I'd lost interest, land size might have been given a boost, but that's not what you've been saying.

 

ETA: The bit about Nazis rings a slight bell. Have you heard of Google-bombing? It's getting a page to the top of the rankings in Google, for a certain searchterm that the page has nothing whatsoever to do with. It's done by creating a great many links to it, all using the searchterm as the clickable link text. The most famous example was getting George Bush junior's page to the #1 ranking for the searchterm "abject failure". Neither of those words appeared on the page but the links got it up there. If my memory is correct, the same thing happened with the GSA, so that the page of a place, person, or group was ranked #1 for a nazi searchterm. Something like that.

[Medhue Simoni]

Hopefully this ends the debate.

Here Is a video created by Torley, that shows him using the search engine at the end of 2007. You will notice, that when he searches for the word Leopard, it find objects on the parcel with the word Leopard in them. Goto 1:29 in the video to see a perfect example. Goto 3:30 and hear Torley talk specifically about finding objects on parcels.

 

I'll also point out, that by 2009, we could teleport directly to the objects on the parcels.

[Clive Hendes]

Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever.

Two mentions of the "spirit of Second Life". As you would expect from references to the deceased. 

The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start.

The next generation virtual world will be BETTER than Second Life. Has any company EVER kept an inferior/obsolete product in circulation for long?

That doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over,

Your rudimentary building or scripting skills, perhaps? Certainly not your inventory, name or rapidly depreciating in price land!

just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience

As opposed to a bog-standard average platform, which is what Second Life has become

and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history.

Yes, they're cutting the cord.

Does this mean we’re giving up on Second Life?

Yes. But don't panic the naive masses just yet:

Absolutely not. It is thanks to the Second Life community that our virtual world today is without question the best there is, and after 11 years we certainly have no intention of abandoning our users nor the virtual world they continually fill with their astounding creativity.

We'll keep the servers running until it makes financial sense to switch them off but make no mistake, Second Life will be the poor man's version of Virtual World MkII 

It’s still very early days for this new project, and as we forge ahead in creating the next generation virtual world, we’ll share as much as we can.

Will that be BEFORE or AFTER everybody purchases an Oculus Rift to experience the lag in 20-20 vision?

If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited!

Get saving up, this won't be free

Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users.

 Truly fulfill the promise - ie: we know Second Life has failed to do so. We won't cease our rolling restarts every now and then, but remember - we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life 

[Medhue Simoni]

Let me be Clear about Why SL started to Decline, and why it is a direct result of the search engine.

LL changing to GSA is EXACTLY why SL started to decline. This is because business owners were no longer being found in the search engine and were no longer making enough to pay for those parcels. Hence why people immediately stopped buying more land and letting go of the islands they had.

What was it about the old search engine that made it so good for every1, including LL? See, this is easy to explain. Because the more land you owned gave you more object keywords, you were ranked higher than people with less land. How much land you owned in SL, was a direct representation of how much wealth you created in SL, at least for merchants. We could not own that much land if we were not generating enough money to pay for that land. When all those objects on your land were no longer counted in the search engine, no body could find your products inworld. Before the GSA, the search engine was almost specifically designed, whether by accident or not, for merchants. It made it as easy as possible to find products.

When merchants blame the Marketplace, I cringe, because the reality is, that the Marketplace is the only thing that saved my business. Every1 flocked to the Marketplace, which made my products able to be found. Of course, I did much better on Xstreet than I do with LL's version, because again, Xstreet was geared for the best merchants, and not about being fair. Today, the SL Marketplace ranks products by sales mostly, when it really should be ranked by relevance first and then price. This promotes more sales and the user can simply refine their search if they want something different. To think that something is too high priced and scares customers is kind of dumb, because the merchant is pricing their product according to their sales. If it's priced high, that really means all parties are happy with that price. Plus, higher prices products have more features and are generally better, which makes the customers happier. The most sold products will always be the 1 linden or 10 linden products, as nobody cares about spending 10 lindens, which kind of means the product is worthless, or almost.

[Phil Deakins]

Ok. With a bit of luck it will end this debate - but not in the way you'd hoped

First. That video was all about the GSA, which was being set up at the time. When you joined (Jan 2007), SL used the previous search system. You wrote that land size, or the number of objects, pushed you up the rankings, so let's get that out of the way first. Land size, or number of objects, did nothing to push you up the rankings, and it can be proved. All you have to do is do what I suggested in the "Here's proof" paragraph, and you will see for yourself that it was only traffic. Can we settle that for that search system now?

 

Ok. Now the GSA. The video said nothing at all about land size, so I assume you showed it because of the objects. Yes, all objects that are set to show in search are included on the parcel's page. That was known when the GSA arrived - and gamed by me and lots of others 

What you may be thinking is that the more objects on the place's page, the bigger the page, and, therefore, the higher it ranks for words that are on the page. Absolutely wrong! It's an assumption that has no merit or evidence whatsoever. Knowing that search engines in the mid to late 90s had a model perfect page, and the nearer you got to it with your page, the higher you ranked. A couple of us tested the idea of a perfect page with the GSA, and we did find that a page of an approximate number of words was ideal, but then a perfect page needed the keywords in the right quantity and the right places, of course. In fact, someone else was testing the same thing at the time and I was competing with it almost daily. Each day we would change our pages in reaction to the ranking effect the other's change had from the day before We never contacted each other, but we probably learned from each other, and it was fun.

So what you are saying with the video is that objects are on the place's pages. Well, we knew that from the moment the GSA arrived. If you are trying to say that the more objects on the page, the higher the rankings, you are very much mistaken. It's a very big leap, without any evidence at all, to jump from (a) objects are on pages to (b) the more there are, the higher the rankings. There is no evidence for it, and there IS evidence against it. Unfortunately, the evidence against it is in my memory, but it got there through testing. Whether or not you accept it is entirely up to you.

I hope we can settle that traffic is the only ranking factor in the pre-GSA search, because that's still there in plain sight, and it's irrefutable. If, for the GSA, all you have to support your idea that land size, or more objects on the land, improves rankings is that video, then it's absolutely clear that all the video shows is that parcel pages have objects listed on them. But we all knew that. It doesn't support any notion of land size, or quantity of objects, improving rankings at all. I can tell you quite categorically that, if I'd put all the objects I sold on the parcel's page, then my rankings would have gone down in the GSA. Page content is all about balance in the page for better rankings. So much so, that webpages that target searchterms should never target more than 2 searchterms per page. That's not possible in SL though, because places only have one page to play with.

[Phil Deakins]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Let me be Clear about Why SL started to Decline, and why it is a direct result of the search engine.

LL changing to GSA is EXACTLY why SL started to decline. This is because business owners were no longer being found in the search engine and were no longer making enough to pay for those parcels. Hence why people immediately stopped buying more land and letting go of the islands they had.

What was it about the old search engine that made it so good for every1, including LL? See, this is easy to explain. Because the more land you owned gave you more object keywords, you were ranked higher than people with less land. How much land you owned in SL, was a direct representation of how much wealth you created in SL, at least for merchants. We could not own that much land if we were not generating enough money to pay for that land. When all those objects on your land were no longer counted in the search engine, no body could find your products inworld. Before the GSA, the search engine was almost specifically designed, whether by accident or not, for merchants. It made it as easy as possible to find products.

When merchants blame the Marketplace, I cringe, because the reality is, that the Marketplace is the only thing that saved my business. Every1 flocked to the Marketplace, which made my products able to be found. Of course, I did much better on Xstreet than I do with LL's version, because again, Xstreet was geared for the best merchants, and not about being fair. Today, the SL Marketplace ranks products by sales mostly, when it really should be ranked by relevance first and then price. This promotes more sales and the user can simply refine their search if they want something different. To think that something is too high prices and scares customer is kind of dumb, because the merchant is pricing their product according to their sales. If it's priced high, that really means all parties are happy with that price.

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Oh my. Medhue, before the GSA arrived, parcels/places did not have webpages for objects to be listed on. The webpages were created FOR the GSA. The GSA needs pages (not just webopages, incidentally) to index. It can't work without them. That's why the webpages were created. They didn't exist before the GSA. The video you posted was all about the GSA - not about its predecessor.

So objects on pages didn't disappear when the GSA came. They arrived when the GSA came.

[irihapeti]

thanks (:

seems to be ok from what I heard in the vid

 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

Ok. With a bit of luck it will end this debate - but not in the way you'd hoped

First. That video was all about the GSA, which was being set up at the time. When you joined (Jan 2007), SL used the previous search system. You wrote that land size, or the number of objects, pushed you up the rankings, so let's get that out of the way first. Land size, or number of objects, did nothing to push you up the rankings,

and it can be proved

. All you have to do is do what I suggested in the

"Here's proof"

paragraph, and you will see for yourself that it was only traffic. Can we settle that for that search system now?

 

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OMG, this is just getting painful now. I showed you a video by Torley that shows exactly what I talked about. It can't work the way it does in that video unless objects counted in the search results. That video is from Nov 12, 2007. It is time stamped when it is uploaded. That is the search engine we had, and you can not say that it isn't. Your proof is not proof at all. It's you believing some1 elses opinion about what they were using at that time. What I am showing you, and talking all about, is the search engine that the SL viewer used, not some 3rd Party viewer. Back in 2007-2008, most people used the SL viewer, not a 3rd party viewer.

[Phil Deakins]

You're right. It really is getting painful. Why? because you refuse to look at the irrefutable proof that is there in plain sight. If you looked at it, you would know for an absolute certainty that you've been mistaken about the pre-GSA search.

The Torley video was about the new (at that time) GSA.

I don't know what more I can say. I've given you irrefutable proof about the pre-GSA search system ranking places solely on traffic. I can't do any more about that. If you refuse to look, your misuderstanding is of your own making.

You think that the Torley video is about the pre-GSA search system but it is not. It's the GSA. What else can I say?

 

ETA:

You wrote:- "That is the search engine we had, and you can not say that it isn't"

Oh yes I can say that it isn't the search engine we had. We didn't have it. It was in the RC viewer at the time, and not yet in the main viewer. That's exactly what the video said. The search we had then was the pre-GSA system that I keep asking you to look at - to categorically prove that what I've been saying is right, and that you've been mistaken..Unfortunately, you've very keen not to be proven wrong, so you don't even look.

[Lexia Moonstone]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

You're right. It really is getting painful. Why? because you refuse to look at the

irrefutable proof

 that is there in plain sight. If you looked at it, you would know for an absolute certainty that you've been mistaken about the pre-GSA search.

The Torley video was about the new (at that time) GSA.

I don't know what more I can say. I've given you irrefutable proof about the pre-GSA search system ranking places solely on traffic. I can't do any more about that. If you refuse to look, your misuderstanding is of your own making.

You think that the Torley video is about the pre-GSA search system but it is not. It's the GSA. What else can I say?

 

ETA:

You wrote:-

"That is the search engine we had, and you can not say that it isn't"

Oh yes I can say that it isn't the search engine we had. We didn't have it. It was in the RC viewer at the time, and not yet on the grid. That's exactly what the video said. The search we had then was the pre-GSA system that I keep asking you to look at - to categorically prove that what I've been saying is right, and that you've been mistaken..

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I'm  hoping the new SL is not backwards compatible with all the augments in this forum lol

[Phil Deakins]

lol. I hope so too

 

ETA: But I wouldn't bet on it lol

[Medhue Simoni]

Well, it seems we are both caught up on GSA or not. I really don't care what it was. My point really has to do with timelines. That said, here is more definitive proof that everything I've been saying is EXACTLY correct.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Beta_Viewer/2.0

Official GSA use did not start until V2.

[Perrie Juran]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Let me be Clear about Why SL started to Decline, and why it is a direct result of the search engine.

---

I don't know what you are measuring when you say "Decline."

Certainly Merchants gave us a lot of added value content such as Malls anchoring Clubs.

But shopping is certainly not the end all experience in Second Life.

We could certainly point to when the Real Estate Bubble burst in SL. 

Then there were the age play scandals and the negative publicity which we still continue to hear about.  If I recall correctly LL didn't have a public relations Guru at the time and with the person who was hired Omertà descended on the Lab.

Then we lost Linden's being In World and interacting with us.

Then add in what many felt was mis-management by Klingon.

How about the Tier increase and the removal of the Non Profit Discount?

It's a long shopping list of things.

We could add to that the decline in expendable income coupled with more entertainment choices.

But if you think shopping for animations at your store was the end all experience for me you seriously need to guess again.

 

eta:shpellling

[Perrie Juran]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Well, it seems we are both caught up on GSA or not. I really don't care what it was. My point really has to do with timelines. That said, here is more definitive proof that everything I've been saying is EXACTLY correct.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Beta_Viewer/2.0

Official GSA use did not start until V2.

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And Viewer 2 did not happen until 2010.

[Phil Deakins]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Well, it seems we are both caught up on GSA or not. I really don't care what it was. My point really has to do with timelines. That said, here is more definitive proof that everything I've been saying is EXACTLY correct.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Beta_Viewer/2.0

Official GSA use did not start until V2.

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That page appears to have been posted in 2009. Where you've got it wrong is that the GSA started with the V2. It started long before the V2. And I have proof

Resident Answers

Have a look at that page. It's in Resident Answers in the orginal archived forum. It's dated 9th April 2008 - long before the V2 came out. It's about optimising parcel pages to rank well in the GSA. The discussions about it had been going on for some time in various threads, and then someone decided to gather useful posts together in one place, and that's the result. Read the quote in the first post. You'll see it talks about Google. That's because the whole things is about a Google search engine - the GSA that we had at that time. You have to accept that because most of the stuff in it was written be me

So Torley's video about the new search was made in Decmeber 2007. By early April 2008, the GSA was the search system, and we'd been discussing it for some time in the forum. Judging by the copyright year at the bottom of the page you linked to, the V2 was new in 2009.

I'm sorry, Medhue, but nothing you've been saying has been right. 

[Phil Deakins]

Was it 2010? The page has a 2009 copyright notice on the bottom, but it could have been late 2009 and written in advance of the V2's release in 2010. Either way, the GSA was here long before the V2. And prior to the GSA we had the system that ranked solely on traffic.

[Perrie Juran]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

Was it 2010? The page has a 2009 copyright notice on the bottom, but it could have been late 2009 and written in advance of the V2's release in 2010. Either way, the GSA was here long before the V2. And prior to the GSA we had the system that ranked solely on traffic.

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On February 23, (2010) Linden Lab announced the new Second Life Viewer 2.0 Public Beta. Viewer 2 went out of beta and was launched as the main Viewer on March 31.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/History_of_Second_Life

 

That seems like an Eternity ago now.

[Phil Deakins]

Thank you, Perrie. So the V2 arrived 2 years after the GSA arrived.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Medhue Simoni wrote:

Let me be Clear about Why SL started to Decline, and why it is a direct result of the search engine.

---

I don't know what you are measuring when you say "Decline."

Certainly Merchants gave us a lot of added value content such as Malls anchoring Clubs.

But shopping is certainly not the end all experience in Second Life.

We could certainly point to when the Real Estate Bubble burst in SL. 

Then there were the age play scandals and the negative publicity which we still continue to hear about.  If I recall correctly LL didn't have a public relations Guru at the time and with the person who was hired Omertà descended on the Lab.

Then we lost Linden's being In World and interacting with us.

Then add in what many felt was mis-management by Klingon.

How about the Tier increase and the removal of the Non Profit Discount?

It's a long shopping list of things.

We could add to that the decline in expendable income coupled with more entertainment choices.

But if you think shopping for animations at your store was the end all experience for me you seriously need to guess again.

 

eta:shpellling

---

Those are good points, but are they ground shaking? Do any of those events move the stats? This is easily provable in the stats. The real turning point, where the stats completely change direction is on April 2, 2010, which correlates with an update to the search engine in V2. Again, if I remember correctly, which it seems that I do, not only was the new V2 viewer affected, but all other viewers lost access to the pages that were created until they updates to V2. Or something to that affect, which is why the old viewers today will not return the same results that we had in 2008. Heck, the whole real world economy in the states fell appart, and SL kept growing for 2 more years.

[Phil Deakins]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Those are good points, but are they ground shaking? Do any of those events move the stats? This is easily provable in the stats. The real turning point, where the stats completely change direction is on

April 2, 2010

, which correlates with an update the search engine in V2. Again, if I remember correctly, which it seems that I do, not only was the new V2 viewer affected, but all other viewers lost access to the pages that were created until they updates to V2. Or something to that affect, which is why the old viewers today will not return the same results that we had in 2008. Heck, the whole real world economy in the states fell appart, and SL kept growing for 2 more years.

---

Show us the stats that "completely change direction" on or about the 2nd April 2010 please. I'm not suggesting that it didn't happen but I would like to see the stats.

April 2nd 2010 is around the time the V2 was launched but I've proved that the GSA (the new search engine) came in 2 years before that. I can promise you that no new search engine or system came in at around the time the V2 was launched, so what "update [to] the search engine", that was so "ground shaking" that it caused the decline to start, happened around the 2nd of April 2010?

Parcels had webpages, with objects listed on them, for the previous 2 years, and they continued to have pages with objects listed on them after that date - right up to today! So what happened?

 

ETA: As I said earlier, after some years of the GSA, we went over to an open source engine. We can no longer see the pages in the search floater like we could with the GSA system. That doesn't mean that they aren't indexed. They do exist. Here's an example that I just looked up:- My Place . Not only do they exist, but they are also fully indexed. I just did a test with my page (the one that's linked to), and I searched on "Tiki Bar small" (without quotes). None of those 3 words are mentioned in what we can see in the search floater (parcel name and description) but my place was listed not far down in the results. So the whole pages are indexed and coming up in the results according to their content. Just as it should be.

In other words, I'm afraid that your theory on a search change being responsible for starting SL's decline, is wrong, Medhue. The details you wrote, concerning objects on pages, are wrong, so the theory must be wrong, especially as nothing much changed concerning search around the date you stated.

[Perrie Juran]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Let me be Clear about Why SL started to Decline, and why it is a direct result of the search engine.

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I don't know what you are measuring when you say "Decline."

Certainly Merchants gave us a lot of added value content such as Malls anchoring Clubs.

But shopping is certainly not the end all experience in Second Life.

We could certainly point to when the Real Estate Bubble burst in SL. 

Then there were the age play scandals and the negative publicity which we still continue to hear about.  If I recall correctly LL didn't have a public relations Guru at the time and with the person who was hired Omertà descended on the Lab.

Then we lost Linden's being In World and interacting with us.

Then add in what many felt was mis-management by Klingon.

How about the Tier increase and the removal of the Non Profit Discount?

It's a long shopping list of things.

We could add to that the decline in expendable income coupled with more entertainment choices.

But if you think shopping for animations at your store was the end all experience for me you seriously need to guess again.

 

eta:shpellling

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Those are good points, but are they ground shaking? Do any of those events move the stats? This is easily provable in the stats. The real turning point, where the stats completely change direction is on

April 2, 2010

, which correlates with an update to the search engine in V2. Again, if I remember correctly, which it seems that I do, not only was the new V2 viewer affected, but all other viewers lost access to the pages that were created until they updates to V2. Or something to that affect, which is why the old viewers today will not return the same results that we had in 2008. Heck, the whole real world economy in the states fell appart, and SL kept growing for 2 more years.

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Correlation still does not equal Causation.

And which Stats are you referring to?

Concurrency or Land Mass?  Or something else?

Why would my not being able to find your store cause me to leave SL?

I would maintain that Land Mass is dependent on Concurrency, not the other way around.

 

@Phil.  I know GSA was around before this but I don't know where this note on V2 fits into the picture:

 

"Search has been redesigned to make it easier and more intuitive to find people, places, and content in Second Life. Search is now HTML-based and powered by the Google Search Appliance (GSA)...."

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Release/2.00#Search

 

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Those are good points, but are they ground shaking? Do any of those events move the stats? This is easily provable in the stats. The real turning point, where the stats completely change direction is on

April 2, 2010

, which correlates with an update the search engine in V2. Again, if I remember correctly, which it seems that I do, not only was the new V2 viewer affected, but all other viewers lost access to the pages that were created until they updates to V2. Or something to that affect, which is why the old viewers today will not return the same results that we had in 2008. Heck, the whole real world economy in the states fell appart, and SL kept growing for 2 more years.

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Show us the stats that "

completely change direction

" on or about the 2nd April 2010 please. I'm not suggesting that it didn't happen but I would like to see the stats.

nothing much changed concerning search around the date you stated.

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I'll toss this in.  Max Concurrency peaked Feb to April 2010.

After April they started their downward trend.

http://gridsurvey.com/economy.php?page=34

(I do wish the GS Reports went back further).

 

eta, click on the chart immediately above the stats.

[Lexia Moonstone]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Medhue Simoni wrote:

Let me be Clear about Why SL started to Decline, and why it is a direct result of the search engine.

---

I don't know what you are measuring when you say "Decline."

Certainly Merchants gave us a lot of added value content such as Malls anchoring Clubs.

But shopping is certainly not the end all experience in Second Life.

We could certainly point to when the Real Estate Bubble burst in SL. 

Then there were the age play scandals and the negative publicity which we still continue to hear about.  If I recall correctly LL didn't have a public relations Guru at the time and with the person who was hired Omertà descended on the Lab.

Then we lost Linden's being In World and interacting with us.

Then add in what many felt was mis-management by Klingon.

How about the Tier increase and the removal of the Non Profit Discount?

It's a long shopping list of things.

We could add to that the decline in expendable income coupled with more entertainment choices.

But if you think shopping for animations at your store was the end all experience for me you seriously need to guess again.

 

eta:shpellling

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you could add to that list:

SL now has competition,  and many of the educators, big business like IBM, and the military now use private open sims. 

the rise of the freebie hunts. 

freebie on the marketplace.  inworld freebie stores din't have a big negative impact on sales, with an inworld store items are not shown next to some one else free items.

the opensim/homesead price change. from 75$ a month to where ever it is now.

the anti camping rules indirectly took away a source of L$ for people who din't want to spend real $ in SL specially important for new residents.   we now have linden realms for that, but ther was a few years inbetween.

Mesh is much harder to build and in greater demand then prim work and sculptmaps, and few have the skills to do it well, other then retexturing full perm clothes, mesh has caused a lot of small time builder to lose sales or go out of business, the same type of small time builder who spent all of the L$ in SL renting land and buying other peoples goods, and don't cash out. 

The marketplace it's self have a big impact on inworld sales and more so then xstreet because of how LL promoted and link to the marketplace.

Simply the size of the marketplace has made it harder for all but the top sellers to be sceen.