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

[Yingzi Xue]

I agree.  The marketplace is a distraction and ever since LL bought it and made it their own there has been a decline in in-world stores.

[Aislin Ceawlin]

I use it when I am too tired to go get the baseball bat to hit myself over the head...lol! It's so much harder than it used to be...:matte-motes-bored:

[Julia Hailey]

OK I will say it... I use the search feature rather regularly I guess.  I have a large list of places I like to visit or shop.  But I often get on a new tangent looking for something and I do search for it using the ingame system.  Now, I won't lie...I sift through quite a few "Land n Leave" places until I find what I was looking for.  But more than a few times I have found a new shop I relly like and LM it so I remember where it was.

I also shop the MP often.  But I generally only buy from established merchants that I already know what quality they create, and if I am just on a lazy spending frenzy.  I prefer to support as many of my favorite creators in world as much as possible.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

I use it a lot to find shops for things I'm looking to buy or to find new places to explore and visit. I did prefer search as it was about 6 or 7 years ago before the search interface update. I believe that there used to be far more results returned (well it seems like it from memory). I used to find some really interesting places and things back then, more so than now, although I don't think that's because there are less interesting places....just that search doesn't always return that much compared to the past. 

[Phil Deakins]

It's interesting that you say that the original search seemed to return more results. I can't say that it didn't but I just did a Places search for 'furniture' and 2909 results were returned. The original search, which still exists, returns a mere 1691 results.

One thing though. Although the current search states 2909 results, it may not show that many. Web search engines only show the top 1000, because who would ever want to look further than 1000? I did start to look all the way down to see how many of the 2909 are actually shown, but I gave it up, because the results are not numbered and it would take a bit of time to find out whether or not all 2909 are shown.

The GSA only showed the top 1000 and people were (rightly) always complaining that their places were not listed. They may have been in the results set but ranked below 1000 so they didn't get shown. Since people pay to have their places show in search, and because the largest number of results possible in SL is small, it may be (probably is) that LL decided not to limit the number shown to 1000 with the current system.

[Tamara Artis]

It would be good to have the results numbered so for example if a business is ranked at 1234. place you could just type in the name of the business in the search and check the ranking, but this only if the actual rank meant something, I don't really see it has any significant value today. I played with the search and tried different things to see how it affects the ranking and managed to get some nice results but it never happened that a person approaches to me and says hey its a great thing to see your place ranked this good lol

[Phil Deakins]

The rankings do mean something. The default is ranking by relevance - the best way. With places, it's the parcel's webpage that's ranked, as it should be but, unfortunately, the parcel owner doesn't have the degree of control over what's in the page that a webpage designer has, although, if the owner understood it, s/he could excercise a fair degree of control and affect the rankings.

If you meant that it doesn't have much relevance because not many people find places via search any more, I've no idea, but my guess would be that the number of people who do is a significant percentage of those who arrive at places. There always was word of mouth and passed on LMs, and that hasn't changed, so my guess is that the percentage of those who arrive via seach hasn't changed all that much either.

I think what has probably made a significant difference is the marketplace, where people can find what they think they'll like and then use the inworld search to find the store and check it out. Rankings won't have any effect on that. However, I do think that, for any serious inworld business, tending to the rankings has to be beneficial.

[Qie Niangao]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

I think what has probably made a significant difference is the marketplace, where people can find what they think they'll like and then use the inworld search to find the store and check it out.

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There are also direct links from Marketplace to in-world locations. Those let shoppers avoid in-world search altogether for those products -- in the event that the links are actually accurate. More often than not, they're to some long-absent skybox above what's become a graveyard of starved breedable critters.

Anyway, it's all an absurd anachronism that there even is a distinction between Marketplace and in-world shopping -- should be exactly the same search automatically populated with exactly the same content. (And yeah: if a merchant has no in-world place to rez their wares then they don't get listed on Marketplace, Tough.)

[Phil Deakins]

I didn't know that - direct links from marketplace pages. The marketplace would still have had a significant impact on how much the inworld search is used.

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Qie Niangao wrote:

Anyway, it's all an absurd anachronism that there even is a distinction between Marketplace and in-world shopping -- should be exactly the same search automatically populated with exactly the same content. (And yeah: if a merchant has no in-world place to rez their wares then they don't get listed on Marketplace, Tough.)

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I agree, but LL didn't get into the the marketplace to make things nice for users. They got into it to make money from the vast number of sales they saw going through their system without them getting a share of it. So they had no vested interest in making it so that sellers needed to have inworld stores. Just the opposite, in fact. Their vested interest is in as many sales as possible going through the marketplace, regardless of any inworld presence.