How many of you are using in-world search to find what you need?

[Tamara Artis]

Simple, do you use the in-world viewer search and how often, and if so for what mostly do you use it?

 

I am playing with it for a while now and slowly starting to think maybe only people who are using the search are people who are interested is their place showing there lol

[Lexia Moonstone]

I use it all the time to find interesting places and things to do, but very rarely for shopping.

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

Tamara Artis wrote:

Simple, do you use the in-world viewer search and how often, and if so for what mostly do you use it?

 

I am playing with it for a while now and slowly starting to think maybe only people who are using the search are people who are interested is their place showing there lol

---

I use it to find a specific place or person whose name I know already. I may very occasionally use it to search for a category that's quite specific, like "World War I Uniforms" but I'd never search for, say, "Animations" or "Dance Clubs." I used to use it to find land but now just use the World Map and see what's for sale.

[Pamela Galli]

Only to find people. Once in a great while maybe a group.

[Tamara Artis]

Thank you ladies:) 

[Syo Emerald]

I use it to find people and places.

[Yingzi Xue]

I use it regularly to find locations.  If you know the name or the theme, it can be fairly useful.  If you're just looking for random results for a specific category, it can be next to impossible to find new locations.  It's a mixed bag.  The old search that wasn't web-based was much more intuitive and you could find exactly what you were looking for.  I wish they would bring it back without traffic as a factor, it would work a lot better and much faster.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

Same here, I use it to find people and groups. I use the MP to find things to buy. If they have an Inworld store i will shop at it, but a lot don't. like myself.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Yingzi Xue wrote:

I use it regularly to find locations.  If you know the name or the theme, it can be fairly usefuly.  If you're just looking for random results for a specific category, it can be next to impossible to find new locations.  It's a mixed bag.  The old search that wasn't web-based was much more intuitive and you could find exactly what you were looking for.  I wish they would bring it back without traffic as a factor, it would work a lot better and much faster.

---

Absolutely agree.

About the only time I use it is if i know the specific exact name of a place.

Legacy search was a thousand times better!

I'm glad some of it's functionality is still alive in the TVS's.

[Tari Landar]

I use it to find new places I haven't been, or places I can only think of part of the name(or content, for example).

It can be effective at times, and others, far less than effective.

 

[Coby Foden]

I use inworld search to find anything what might interest me at the moment - for example: places, events, shops, groups, people. I use both the new search and the legacy search which some TPVs still have.

[irihapeti]

if I am looking for stuff that I might buy (even when I don't know quite what that maybe is yet) then I search inworld Classifieds. I mostly use it to find shop and shopping sims that I havent been to yet. Then when I TP to it it ends up in my TP History so I can find later

then I bascially explore the whole sim. Go in all the shops for a nosey. Sometimes if I find a shop on the sim that is interesting stuff (even tho sometimes it wasnt in my search keyword) then I usual make a LM for that shop. So I can more easy remember which shop among all the shops on the sim it was/is

if is not shopping and just exploring generally then I mostly just random TP off the Map. Unless I have something less general I might decide to try find/explore. So keyword into Places search and jump and hope 

+

i search Events quite a lot as well 

[Dillon Levenque]

I use inworld search for people all the time. I use it for places, too. Sometimes because I know the name of a place but don't have an LM, sometimes because I'm looking for a particular theme and don't know any places.

I have totally given up on it as a way to find places to shop (almost—if I'm looking for something relatively unusual like WW I uniforms, I'd use Search at least as a start). All of my normal shopping searches are now done on MP. I might make my purchase inworld, but I find the product on the MP. 

[Tiffy Vella]

Never for shopping, as the results are so unreliable. Daily to bring up a person's name. Occasionally to find a landmark for a place I already know, but for a business landmark I prefer to go via the owner's profile picks.

[Bree Giffen]

I actually use it for shopping in-world when trying to find places that sell certain things. I always get this feeling that there are stores in-world where the owner refuses to use the marketplace. I recently used it to look at hair stores and found several that I normally never go to.

[sirhc DeSantis]

Yes, use it quite often in its 'legacy' format - never had much time for the 'new' format (mostly TPV user)

[Phil Deakins]

---

Yingzi Xue wrote:

I use it regularly to find locations.  If you know the name or the theme, it can be fairly useful.  If you're just looking for random results for a specific category, it can be next to impossible to find new locations.  It's a mixed bag. 

The old search that wasn't web-based was much more intuitive and you could find exactly what you were looking for. 

I wish they would bring it back without traffic as a factor, it would work a lot better and much faster.

---

You can still use that search in TPVs (certainly in Singularity). And you can take traffic out of it altogether by having the results listed alphabetically, forward ot back. There was never anything "intuitive" about it though, and there still isn't. It's not a search engine anyway - not as we know search engines. You just type what you want into the box and click the button. It hardly qualifies as intuitive, especially when the alternative is almost the same.

The problem with it is that there is/was no system in it, apart from traffic, to rank places. If the results are listed alphabetically, it's not ranking, and, if they are listed by traffic, it is ranking of a fashion but not really ranking the places. In other words, that system was utter crap.

On the other hand, every search there has been since then (all 2 of them) has been orders of magnitude better. There is no doubt about that, and no possible argument against it. Because the search systems we've had since then have been actual search engines that actually rank places according to what's in them, whereas the legacy search was not. It was just the results of a simple database query, without any ranking whatsoever done on them..

[Phil Deakins]

---

Bree Giffen wrote:

I actually use it for shopping in-world when trying to find places that sell certain things.

I always get this feeling that there are stores in-world where the owner refuses to use the marketplace

. I recently used it to look at hair stores and found several that I normally never go to.

---

There are. So promote that 'feeling' to actual knowledge, and know that there are

[Ren Toxx]

I mainly use it to quickly get the current location of shops I want to visit (I'm too lazy to make a LM of them, too forgetful to remember if I'd already done so before, and too fed up with some of them moving so often as to make the two previous points moot), and the profiles of people I want to check up; and only very rarely to find a group. I have about zero use for unknown stores' or places search, as in “I want shoes, so I'm going to see what stores the Search finds for me”, mainly out of impatience towards the tons of useless, unrelated results caused by so many owners gaming the search engine with loads of popular tags and description words regardless of whether they apply to their particular trade or not.

[Jazleen Raynier]

I use it all the time. When I left SL for a while I deleted all of my LMs - so now I'm starting to re-build it and use it every day for clubs, shops, places of interest, romantic places etc. 

[Tex Monday]

For me, it depends, actually.

I'll use it to find places when I'm looking for a general type of place (like a beach or adult type of place); If I know someone's name, I'll use it to find their profile information (and to see if they're on line or not...yeah stalker, I know); once in a while, I'll use it to find items inworld (beds,chairs, clothes) and once in a blue moon, I'll use the events page (if I'm incredibly bored).

Problem with most of these things, as we all know, is that it can give you hundreds of choices some of which are completely worthless. I've spent plenty of time jumping from sim to sim only to find it empty or not matching what I wanted.

How often do I use it? Lately, a lot more than I have...but maybe a couple times a week....

Of course, the question remains...what's the alternative? If you don't use search or aren't teleported by someone to place, how do you find the places to go???

I don't fit your hypothesis, Tamara, as I don't own an inworld store....:matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

[Freya Mokusei]

I use in-world search once every 10 logged-in hours, on average. I use it maybe 10 times (as in, sessions not searches) per week while not logged in/while not in-world.

I do track traffic and placements for a variety of locations (but I don't own any locations that I tack), but that's not at all my primary activity while using search. I mostly use it to find things like which parcels belong to which sim, and commonality between searchable entities.

So, er, short answer? I don't use it to shop or explore - I've always relied on word of mouth. Events and destination guide (and all the other aggregated stuff) just looks horrible and unappealling. I also hate that using Search in-world leaves Search minimised - letting it pop up whenever I least want it to.

[Tamara Artis]

Its interesting to read all answers

Recently I used it to find gacha sales (and omgomg those places are like 10 times better than the current events because they have sooo many items and they're all in a complete mess), I was searching for a particular item and it was useful. For people I have cool gadget that my avi wears all the time, I just copy/paste the name of the person in local and it gives a profile link with info is the person online or not (search says offline if the person has set it in preferences for non-friends). 

Sometimes I go on my alt and randomly teleport to different locations from the Destinations guide (which doesn't really counts in using the search) and I used it last year when I was buying new land..

Then yesterday because I moved to a new sim and the old pace is still active so I wanted to check is the new place close to the old one's ranking lol. And thats all, a bit sad because there are thousands of places hidden god knows where and only way to find about them is if I see a random post somewhere out of the SL world. Someone said they gave up because it just gives you tons of non-related results and if you don't have the time or patience to go on that adventure the search becomes useless. At least for me, but I wanted to see do people still use it and if so, for what. 

 

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

search.secondlife.com treats its friends well. LL could do a better job teaching everybody how to use it, especially how to list things. i use it all the time, but mostly in a browser instead of in-viewer so that the world.secondlife.com pages are available.

not enough places take good advantage of the "show in search" option for objects, they hinder their search visibility because they aren't showing off what they have to offer.

 

[Shiima]

I used it for people and places. i don't really like the marketplace for 2 reasons. 1 is it's so freaking slow and 2 is i login to second life to be in a virtual world, so why shop outside of it? I know its convenient sometimes but it takes  away from the experience.