What is wrong with SL's search function? It's keeping people from finding their destinations!!

[Kerri Gaelyth]

Recently, the "search" function has been out of whack for weeks. 

Here's an example, I typed in "Soul Skin", the name of a store I was looking ( for. It's a pretty well-established place, and should have been at the very top of the search list. Instead it was number 26, and on the SECOND PAGE of search matches! I got things like "Money Island", "**bleep**> (censored)

This has been pretty typical for awhile now. I always have to dig way down to find what I was actually looking for. Sometimes I have found more relevant results by going outside SL to Google. Either the search function is broken, or I suspect certain locations are paying money to force themselves up to the top of the search list. Either way, it is disruptive and not helpful, especially to new Avatars.

[Cinnamon Lohner]

I agree that the search is mostly disfunctional these days.  However, in the case of your example, I got Soul Skin as the second entry found.   Did you include the quotes in your search string?   A search for  Soul skin  without quotes pulled up a ton of junk.  However a search for  "Soul skin"  picked it up as the second entry behind another shop that used the phrase Soul Skin in its description.

--Cinn

[Kerri Gaelyth]

Wow, that "bleep" - it looks like the forums are being censored. Are the words l*e*s*b*i*a*n and s*t*r*i*p*c*l*u*b really so horrible for these forums?  Anyway, those were some of the results I got that were NOT what I was looking for.

Hey Cinnamon, I see what you are saying about using quotes, and thank you, although if I'm only searching for one word, then I still have the same problem.

[Rene Erlanger]

Sea Linden and her team have screwed ALL Search. Maybe its a drive for all consumers to use their beloved Marketplace,  meanwhile SL Businesses (particularly Merchants) are closing their businesses left right and centre. It's very sad to see...especially some of the established ones. :smileysad:

[Rene Erlanger]

 

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Cinnamon Lohner wrote:

I agree that the search is mostly disfunctional these days.  However, in the case of your example, I got Soul Skin as the second entry found.   Did you include the quotes in your search string?   A search for  Soul skin  without quotes pulled up a ton of junk.  However a search for  "Soul skin"  picked it up as the second entry behind another shop that used the phrase Soul Skin in its description.

--Cinn

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Yep, , using quotes always produced the most accurate search results.....nothing has changed. The problem for SL Businesses is that "using quotes" is not the default way of using the SL Search engine.

It would be nice if the GSA appliance could  return the same results as "quoted searches" without the use of quotation marks.

[Juliet Moonshadow]

I agree, its terribly messed up and LL knows about it. Or at least they must from the number of people I know who have complained. I can't imagine a new resident staying in the game long if they can't find anything. I know I wouldn't have made it long in sl if all I could find when I joined was freebie and sex places. There is so much more to do in world that gets hidden. Plus despite the affect on new residents, the true sl businesses shouldn't be suffering due to the ease at which search can be manipulated. And the quality of a business should be what speaks for them, not some broken search results.

[Argus Collingwood]

I sort of view this as an application of the Chaos Theory. It's Searching Roulette where the Wheel of Search Fortune stops in random places and we get to look at places we have never gone before.:smileywink:  It could be worse, we could have earthquakes, tornados, typhoons and termites,:smileysurprised:

[Rene Erlanger]

 

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Juliet Moonshadow wrote:

I agree, its terribly messed up and LL knows about it. Or at least they must from the number of people I know who have complained. I can't imagine a new resident staying in the game long if they can't find anything. I know I wouldn't have made it long in sl if all I could find when I joined was freebie and sex places. There is so much more to do in world that gets hidden. Plus despite the affect on new residents, the true sl businesses shouldn't be suffering due to the ease at which search can be manipulated. And the quality of a business should be what speaks for them, not some broken search results.

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Depends what Linden Lab grand plan for Commerce is! Surely they have data surrounding businesses closing, one can link it to the amounts of land abandoned on Mainland as a general guideline...and assume that similar trends are occuring on Estate sims too. (maybe even moreso as Tiers are more expensive)

 

GSA 6 is not the ideal application to use as a search engine for a Game's economy.

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) Universal Search provides fast, relevant and secure access to information across the corporate intranet, regardless of document format or location. Suitable for 500,000 to many billions of documents. 

Customizable ranking: Administrators can easily tune results ranking to the needs of their organization, or provide different departments with their own customized settings. Ranking can be biased using a wide range of criteria, including source, collection, document age and metadata.

IMO they were better off with it's predeccessor. 

It doesn't help that Sea Linden and her team are gaming their own system, by applying "parcel size" bias too......it's a smack in the face for every small to medium size business in Second Life.

 

 

[Opensource Obscure]

I often hear people complaining about Search results, but I rarely find insightful replies to them.

Can anyone provide us with a good reading of the current situation?

I don't need theories about Linden Lab's plans or snarky and offensive statements about the intelligence of their employees. Those are the usual kind of reply to this issue.

I need instead a technically reliable and up-to-date description of the problem. What do you suggest to read?

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

I find the best way to search is to use Google directly in a browser, rather than the internal search.  For example

site:world.secondlife.com/ soul skin

brings up the original poster's desired shop as the first result.

Since Google has a search engine that actually works, you can use the following to look for
things if your SL viewer search sucks. For all but the specific resident name, type it into web browser
Google search bar. For specific resident name type it directly into web browser address box.

For all:
site:world.secondlife.com/ [search terms]

For places:
site:world.secondlife.com/place/ [search terms]

For residents:
site:world.secondlife.com/resident/ [name]

For groups:
site:world.secondlife.com/group/ [search terms]

For a specific resident profile:
https://my.secondlife.com/user.name

For Marketplace search:
site:marketplace.secondlife.com [search terms]

 

[Darrius Gothly]

 

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Opensource Obscure wrote:

I need instead a technically reliable and up-to-date description of the problem. What do you suggest to read?

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Perhaps ... http://bit.ly/fTvOOm

 

[Phil Deakins]

The Soul Skin page has a negative boost and can't be expected to rank at the top for a search on "soul skin" (without quotes).

 

[Darrius Gothly]

 

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Phil Deakins wrote:

The Soul Skin page has a negative boost and can't be expected to rank at the top for a search on "soul skin" (without quotes).

 

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Their -1 Boost is because they have the word "skin" (and its variant "skins") repeated so many times in their Land Description. A -1 Boost that we see is not necessarily a bad thing as it can also be created by various "mistakes" in naming objects set to Show In Search .. and that is often not penalized by the GSA ranking process.

When you search for "soul skins" (using quotes) they are ranked second of two results. The one above them is a much larger parcel (49360 sqm) with the term only found in their parcel objects, whereas Soul Skin is a fairly small parcel (5120 sqm) and the name appears in almost every object on their parcel.

Just because we see a -1 Boost does NOT mean the page fed to the GSA also has that same Boost rating. There are many examples of parcels that rank highly yet still show a -1 Boost in the public HTML page. The fact that they show us one page then create a totally separate and completely different page (with completely different Boost and other ranking factors) is deceitful at worst and plain useless at best. How can that store owner hope to "fix" their problem unless they know why they are being penalized? (Phil, you and I know because we DO this stuff routinely. They're here to sell skins, not be SEO Gurus.)

[Phil Deakins]

Whilst the page we see is not the page/data that the GSA sees, I don't accept that a visible negative boost is not fed to the GSA. The visible boost may be what the GSA is fed, or it may be only a part of the boost that the GSA is fed. Either way, I don't accept that a visible negative boost doesn't have a negative impact on a page's rankings.

Also, I don't accept that the skin seller didn't consider search rankings when writing the description, which is full of skin-based words. Yes, s/he is here just to sell skins and not to do seo, but rankings were certainly in mind when writing that description.

I agree that it's possible to get a negative boost by accident but the lines have to be drawn somewhere. If the search team didn't draw any lines, then we would all be filling our pages with an enormous amount of keyword repetitions, just like we did until very recently, and the top rankings would be decided according to that. So accidents are bound to happen but it's better to have some accidents than to continue with the keyword repetition contests that we had.

I also agree that it's very bad to have a system where pages' rankings can be negatively impacted by things that the parcels owners can't know, and it's particularly bad that parcel size has any impact at all.