stupidly designed marketplace search and other badly thought changes

[elsa Liebknecht]

Hi, I'd like help on how to properly use the marketplace search box.

For examplelet's say I want to find a green hair; so I write "green hair"in the search box and hit enter, of course I get a lot of nonsense from shoes to dildos to transvestite alien costumes so, my next thought, I choose "Avatar accessories" from the expanding "search in:" menu , but from there there is no way to select "hair" or "women's hair" so instead I use the "Search Filter" at the left of the page. There I can get to the subcategory "hair" but now I have no way to search for the keyword "green" in that category all I can do is choose permissions etc,

So just how in hell can I search for a keyword inside a specific category? Is this even possible? And if it's possible, why is the way to do this very basic search task so incredibly obscure/ non intuitive??

 

Oh and other thing, the way the marketplace works now it makes it very very difficult for customers to leave a rating since after you buy something there is no "review this item" link in a visible place and most folks, (including myself) are not likely to go trough the hassle of going through the whole "my account/order history" to leave a rating. 

[Randall Ahren]

Put green in the search box and hit return. Then on the left, choose avatar accessories > hair. Several results for green hair will show up near the top of the search results. The first is:

by Alice Klinge 

A&A Zany Hair Greens (shortcut flexi hair)

L$1

4.3 stars Reviews (14)

Alli&Ali Designs

That last result on the first page is:

::TWL:: Kiku - Lime

L$9

5 stars Reviews (1)

 

If cost is an important factor, there is also a freebie green mohawk that appears between the above two results.

[elsa Liebknecht]

Thanks! that works, still it's pretty akward and non intuitive, I mean, you got to go through the whole clicking subcategories whenever you change the keywords, even if you just want to search for something inside a specific category.

[Cerise1488303085]

Hi, I have this little browser extension that makes the marketplace search hurt less. It will remember what category you are in, it shows the keywords on the product pages so your search rsults are less mysterious, and lets you show or hide the featured items section.

It can install right into Chrome, and it will work in Firefox if you have the Greasemonkey extension.  It should still work in Safari with Greasekit or Ninjakit, but I have not tested those in a while. It was working in Opera too the last time I checked, but I have yet to find a user script soluton for IE that does not make me scream in horror.

This little script makes me smile, I have to take out more features over time than I add, because sllllllllowwwwwwwllllly LL adds them. With luck, some day they wll add this bit too.

[Zanara Zenovka]

"green hair"

neither SL search or marketplace do this implicitly

[Phil Deakins]

I don't think that anyone at LL has ever come across the word "usability" or, if they have, they don't know what it means - or, if they know what it means, they can't be bothered with it.

[Cerise1488303085]

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Zanara Zenovka wrote:

"green hair"

neither SL search or marketplace do this implicitly

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Right, who said that they did? Not I. the add-on I offered above makes the Marketplace search remember what category it searched last, so that the drilling hurts less,  That is all.

[Zanara Zenovka]

Good grief - it's not all about you. Merely telling the OP how to do their desired search.

[Cerise1488303085]

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Zanara Zenovka wrote:

Good grief - it's not all about you. Merely telling the OP how to do their desired search.

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You replied to my post, so you made it about me. And you did not tell the OP how to do anything, you merely said it can't be done without any explanation, not very helpful at all since it is possible to get better results with better keyword choices and custom query strings.

[Zanara Zenovka]

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Cerise wrote:

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Zanara Zenovka wrote:

Good grief - it's not all about you. Merely telling the OP how to do their desired search.

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You replied to my post, so you made it about me. And you did not tell the OP how to do anything, you merely said it can't be done without any explanation, not very helpful at all since it is possible to get better results with better keyword choices and custom query strings.

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ROFL are you serious?

I replied to the last post on the thread - hardly makes it personal lol

And yes I told the OP exactly how to do their search - I'm sure they understood, but how about I spell it out for you?

Using quotes "green hair" gives you only the results that have both terms. In many commonly used search engines now, eg Google, this is implicit, ie you only have to type green hair, not "green hair" to achieve that result. In SL search this needs to be explicit, you have to type "green hair".

My original post gave all this information for anyone with average reading comprehension skills who's not overly paranoid and looking for personal attacks where there are none. I suggest you develop both these attributes.

[Cerise1488303085]

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Zanara Zenovka wrote:

ROFL are you serious?

I replied to the last post on the thread - hardly makes it personal lol

If you wanted to reply to a different post, the sensible thing would be to reply to that different post. This is how conversations work, you address the person you want to address, not some random other party, and it is exceptionally silly to blame the other party because of your own inability to tell people apart.

And yes I told the OP exactly how to do their search - I'm sure they understood, but how about I spell it out for you?

Using quotes "green hair" gives you only the results that have both terms. In many commonly used search engines now, eg Google, this is implicit, ie you only have to type green hair, not "green hair" to achieve that result. In SL search this needs to be explicit, you have to type "green hair".

Thank you for spelling out your answer (note that the original post included the exact same quotation marks), but you are mistaken, this is not really how to get effective results from the marketplace search. It does not really have exact phrase matching. The quotes will still give an approximate match, with stemming applied, and other text can appear between the keywords within the quotes. This will indeed narrow the results but not in the most useful way. That search term only returns 31 items, missing most of the actual listings for green hair. A much more satisfactory result can be had by including the names of parent categories in the search. For example, the search term avatar accessories hair green currently returns 686 items, with 641 or 93% in the hair category. There is still a garbage in garbage out problem, because of keyword stuffing by merchants, but it still returns hundreds of real matches that the quoted string cannot find.

My original post gave all this information for anyone with average reading comprehension skills who's not overly paranoid and looking for personal attacks where there are none. I suggest you develop both these attributes.

You are again mistaken. You replied to a different post than the one that asked the question you purported to answer, you did not fully read the original post, you offered a solution that did not yield many good matches, and you reflected blame for your own follies on others. Perhaps you should look closer to home for where corrective measures need application.

[Zanara Zenovka]

OK - Spelling it out slowly:

It's

Not

about

You.

No one cares about whatever drama you want to create over this.

I stated one fact - SLM search uses quotation marks for specific phrase searches:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Searching-and-browsing-the-Marketplace/ta-p/817001

That is all.