Test Out New Search, Delivering More Relevant, Faster Results

[Prokofy Neva]

Blondin,

 

When Viewer 2 stops *shutting off my wireless service* then I can test this. This special Search Test beta viewer is like every other Viewr 2.x, beta or release, *it cuts off my wireless service*.

Not just crashes me, but SHUTS OFF MY INTERNET. No piece of software should be reaching into my machine and doing that sort of destructive thing.

Please don't tell me *I* have to do something to change this. I don't. It's not my problem. It's not about my cache settings -- they are exactly the same as on viewer 1. Changing the cache settings doesn't change a thing anyway. It's not about anything else. Please don't blame it on OTHER software on my machine that DOES NOT cause this, because Viewer 1.23 does NOT cut off my actual Internet service.

It's a pretty big nuisance, and it's worsened -- before I could get 5 minutes of time online before the cut off -- it now cuts off immediately upon log-on. So you Lindens MUST become curious about this, must validate it, and stop telling me there's something I need to change -- and I will pre-emptively cut off anybody telling me "it's my computer" in subsequent comments, too, because software that forces an Internet disconnection is the primary problem -- whatever it does, has to be stopped.

Lots of people saying "they crashed" in fact likely had this problem. And others do, too.

If you deprecate 1.23 search and other functionality, I'll simply have to sell my land. I don't plan on buying a new computer, switching my ISP from Verizon, or whatever combo of tricks might get your software not to do this. You need to change your software. I realize you want to shift the blame for this, but then, have less customers.

As for saving search for only 15 minutes, that's not progress but only more frustration. It should save until *I* close the window. Google doesn't save its results only 15 minutes, and you're using the GSA. It's a completely self-serving gimmick you're forcing in to make people see the ads again. It doesn't help shoppers, as they will flit from place to place and not linger and buy due to this dumb time limit.

There's only one reasonable thing to do to save the economy -- put back 1.23 search, make search/places plus traffic order the relevance, and stop trying to be the Internet. We are not the Internet.

If you have completely removed traffic at all (in past viewer 2.x it was lessoned but in theory still available as one sort -- although wildly inaccurate) -- you've only harmed the econonmy's chief free and fair signal of quality. The gaming of the first few slots is not the problem you and the geeks imagine. It's what enabled merited higher results for many people.

Those people are forced out of business now.

[Prokofy Neva]

Translation: the Lindens need to add arbitrary human discretion to search functions, in order to respond to ARs that you put in against your competitors -- and  they need to rule in your favour. LOL.

The real problem here is that there is any "SEO guru industry" at all in the tiny and arbitrary artificial world of SL. It's misleading, it's overpriced, and it's easily outdated.

If you are paying anybody anything to help you show up in Search, you are paying too much, and doing things that likely the Lindens will be changing in the next iteration to stop what is indeed merely sophisticated gaming of Search.

[Darrius Gothly]

And paying anyone to "Manage property" is wasted money when you could just live without owning any property at all.

ROFL!!

Welcome back to the forums Prok. Glad to see you haven't lost your "edge". *waves and goes back to doing useful things*

[Ann Otoole]

Parcel size is irrelevant and people lobbying hard to get LL to artificially inflate their rankings because they have large parcels with little relevant content need to go back and make more relevant content.

If a person chooses to have a small parcel and a large parcel or 10 parcels in the same sim and chooses to group them all to increase prims for the store on a small parcel because of the small parcel location then they should not be penalized because mainland is a chopped up puzzle of zillions of small parcels.

People need to just lay off the parcel size thing. Nobody is being discriminated against. I hear people saying large parcels rank better and then others are saying small parcels are ranking better. Whatever. People are seeing what they want to see. The ranking is based on relevancy and quantity of unique content. And that is how it should be. Perhaps some other factors but I tired of trying to figure it out and if honesty doesn't work then SL isn't worth being in.

 

To all "SEO Specialists": I rank well on the GSA where I want to (long after it destroyed my business but oh well it destroyed the entire SL economy anyway so whatever I was not alone and LL gets $300 or so less per month from me as a result). I rank well on the new search. I changed nothing. I simply don't cheat. And not cheating works. You either make lots of unique items for the subject under search or you don't. If you don't then go find some other way to market your few items. A case in point is although I like to make jewelry I already know I cannot get any ranking in that market because the leaders have thousands of products and can make more as fast as I can. There is no way for me to rank in search for jewelry. There is only room in any sector for about 50 stores. If you don't get it then hey exercise alternatives available to you. Like perhaps focusing on something else like complete outfits that include jewelry and get your great stuff blogged so people will know about it. Or whatever alternative market works for you. There are millions of stores in SL and only 10 can be in the top 10. This whole business is beginning to sound like Highlander.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Er, no, dear, but thanks for playing.

You don't pay mainland landlords "more money" to manage your property. You pay them *less* than if you were buying land from Linden Lab and paying tier, or buying land as a "rental" from a "sold" island property. Much less. Mainland landlords can leverage bulk prices for sims after the first half sim, and also leverage group tier of 10 percent extra tier, and leverage simply economies of scale, i.e. putting out free prefabs for people. These perks that Lindens provide to encourage group living and infact encourage rentals -- which they have ALWAYS encouraged because it sells them more land with less customers to take care of individually -- is a good thing. There is no "gaming" of the system. Offering bulk discounts or discounts for repeat buys or aggregating customers -- these are all normal. Open, normal, quantifiable -- anybody can buy mainland, make a group, and have the exact same advantages.

What's strange is the SEO guru that feed on the carrion of broken dreams...obfuscating knowledge...pretending that their hunches are a science that must be sold...

[Nuhai Ling]

From the first comments to the last it seems everyone saw this, "... you can still use the 1.23 Viewer, but search functionality will be impaired once new search is released into general availability..."

To translate from Lindenese, "We have told you that we are only working on Viewer 2 and we keep our promises! No matter how bad it is and how few of you like it, our improvements will only work with Viewer 2. Go ahead and download Viewer 1.25 or a third party option from our official viewer list but they won't work. We prefer to give you lower performance and a bad experience because that is what we do best!"

Announcements like these sound great until we all realize Linden Lab is only improving things for the minority few. Sure we will all be forced to Viewer 2 eventually but right now I like my reliable car instead of a brand new Yugo. I will check out the new search in a year or two when they pry my old viewer from my cold pixilated hand!

[Darrius Gothly]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

What's strange is the SEO guru that feed on the carrion of broken dreams...obfuscating knowledge...pretending that their hunches are a science that must be sold...

---

Go talk to my clients Prok. Ask them what I "sold" them. Ask them what I represented as my product, my knowledge and my service.

You're engaging in some rather typical (and wrong) imaginary scenarios here .. and labelling me without actually knowing the truth. Before you step over the line to where you start making proclamations that are not only untrue but wander into legally actionable territory .. go make youself familiar with the facts.

I've politely ignored your personal attacks for quite some time .. primarily because everyone pretty much assigns you all the credence of a drug-deranged fairy tale. But when you start slandering me and proclaiming me as some sort of charlatan preying on the naive .. you best make sure you have your documentation and proof solid or we WILL be discussing things in a court of law.

Clear?

[Void Singer]

You know full well that SL has never worked well with wireless... wireless doesn't handle the sustained and erratic stream of data from SL... if it's shutting off, then you have a problem with crap hardware... no one else has this problem, because they're all bright enough to realize that heavy irregular streaming + wireless is a recipe for problems.

@Ann
Parcel size WAS over emphasized in the past, it's not a claim, it was a testable fact. no one is suggesting we return to that... it is however relevant to a great many places (and your extra prims example is broken since you can group any parcel on the same region together). it's not a simple on/off issue, you might try some color vision on it.

@Ciaran:
I pity the poor soul who would try to implement category switching for keywords, twice as much if they they had to try to place category words .... the only way to do that properly is under user control... and even that would be likely to be a mess between shopping and every other type of activity wanting it's own special category.

 

 

[Ciaran Laval]

 

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Ann Otoole wrote:

Parcel size is irrelevant and people lobbying hard to get LL to artificially inflate their rankings because they have large parcels with little relevant content need to go back and make more relevant content.

 

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Indeed Ann, ths is the point, large parcel, little relevant content shouldn't score higher than small parcel lots of relevant content.

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Ann Otoole wrote:

This whole business is beginning to sound like Highlander.

 

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Which one!

[Ciaran Laval]

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Void Singer wrote:

 

@Ciaran:

I pity the poor soul who would try to implement category switching for keywords, twice as much if they they had to try to place category words

.... the only way to do that properly is under user control... and even that would be likely to be a mess between shopping and every other type of activity wanting it's own special category.

 

 

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I did say it would be a nightmare and you're right on categories, I'd want a roleplaying category!

[Ann Otoole]

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Ciaran Laval wrote:

Which one!

 

 

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The only relevant part: THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE! (top ranked in search)

 

The harder some try, spending time and resources on gaming search, the lower they rank. All the while they could have been making moar better stuff.

The most simple most obvious things work best.

 

One of which is having loads of money to burn irl and to toss at your fun hobby so your classified is always on the main page of search.

[Ciaran Laval]

No I meant which Highlander Movie!

 

Oh wait, just got it, sorry Ann! :smileyhappy:

[Void Singer]

since the all sucked.... none of them... the card game! lol

[Cerise Sorbet]

---

Nuhai Ling wrote:

From the first comments to the last it seems everyone saw this, "... you can still use the 1.23 Viewer, but search functionality will be impaired once new search is released into general availability..."

To translate from Lindenese, "We have told you that we are only working on Viewer 2 and we keep our promises! No matter how bad it is and how few of you like it, our improvements will only work with Viewer 2. Go ahead and download Viewer 1.25 or a third party option from our official viewer list but they won't work. We prefer to give you lower performance and a bad experience because that is what we do best!"

Announcements like these sound great until we all realize Linden Lab is only improving things for the minority few. Sure we will all be forced to Viewer 2 eventually but right now I like my reliable car instead of a brand new Yugo. I will check out the new search in a year or two when they pry my old viewer from my cold pixilated hand!

---

Cool VL viewer is based on Snowglobe and there is already a new version 1.26.0.4 out, with the new search beta enabled as a checkbox on the old All search tab.Other Snowglobe based TPVs do not even have to figure out how to make it work now, Henri already did the work for them. Since the old search won't even be shut down for a few months, there is definitely nothing to worry about. (The Map button does not work yet, but that can be had indirectly from the More info button. Likewise Offer Telport and IM buttons are not working, but the Profile button does work and will get you there. These are the feastures that need new secondlife:// URL support.)

[Ciaran Laval]

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Void Singer wrote:

since the all sucked.... none of them... the card game! lol

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Oh blasphemy! The first one was great!

[Medhue Simoni]

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Ann Otoole wrote:

 

One of which is having loads of money to burn irl and to toss at your fun hobby so your classified is always on the main page of search.

---

Some of those big spenders don't even read the blog and completely wasted all that money. There were at least half a dozen, not long ago, that never changed their ads from when we could use alot more characters. They still caught a benefit from v1.23 users tho. Funny thing was, some woke up when only half as many customers were finding them, and now they dominate again, lol. Good thing LL likes to give them exposure.

[Void Singer]

Great? meh poor pacing, poorer acting (horrible lead), it gets a B from me at best. the series was an improvement for a season or two.

[Ann Otoole]

Dear Blondin,

 

I went to one of the "Happening Now" locations tonight. The overwhelming number of "avatars" that would not load that kept "shouting" random stuff with no conversational context was rather annoying. So I stated that object generated green text was obviious. One of the gesture bots immediately shouted "LL" and many unrendered avatars vanished.

 

You have work to do with permanently banning venue operators that are using non declared scripted agents so you can get them out of events.

[Qie Niangao]

No, don't permaban them.  Why lose the tier?  Instead just manually set their result ranking to the bottom of the pack, with no explanation.  Then when they come here to b*tch about how Search is broken, we'll all know (but shhh!  don't spoil the joke!).

If only it were possible, it would be even better to keep their search listing ranked at the very top but only when queried by them, their alts, and everyone in their landowning group, while burying it for every other searcher.

[Adam Spark]

There's too much emphasis on happening now with events. I want to be able to plan ahead. It took more effort to view the daily live music calendar and that to me is a step backwards. I shouldn't have to find and check off "ongoing" (after assuming and hoping that would achieve what I wanted). We screamed at you for months to restore the events category calendar and you finally did. Now you've impaired it.

The filters should be available right off the bat, not once you've executed a search.

The font sizes are atrociously small.

Having real difficulty getting the search result previews to close. I expand them and clicking the little x does nothing most of the time.

Would rather be able to remember what page a certain result is on as I browse them, as opposed to scrolling back up over 200 results, to be honest.

Looking at Happening Now on the front page, theres 9 events. An inexcusable amount of further investigation reveals much more. And why am I having to UNCHECK Happening Now in filters in order to show them?

Clicked another category to browse it and it closed the filters and took me to the main page.

Your small, incremental fixes were actually working to repair search. Now you've butchered it again (albeit not as badly). Stop tearing down the house to change its entire foundation on us. I know that has to be done every now and then but this is ridiculous.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Don't expect any more comments from Blondin on here or elsewhere.  There is a strong rumour going around that he left Linden Lab on Friday.  Maybe someone from LL would like to comment.

[Void Singer]

... and if not that's perfect bait to get him to post back? =)

 

I will say this... the speed of results is dramatically improved, so kudos for that

[Ann Otoole]

So how will we know if they post a fix for the crash on startup?

[Pussycat Catnap]

Another issue with the new search is that if the window it pops up in is too small, there will be no vertical scroll bar. To enable the vertical scroll bar you have to -widen- the window until there is no more horizontal scroll bar.

 

 

[ItsJusta Littlething]

i think it is great except for those of us who can not update there viewers....i guess we are expendable, even after several years as a paying resident. Oh well