Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?

[bigmoe Whitfield]

1 minute ago, Bitterthorn said:

It is absolutely likely they are using the programmable search engine, but I wouldn't know for sure unless someone from LL has spoken about it openly. 

That said, the key word there is programmable. However the search works for SL will be wholly unique to SL.

which is what the appliance from google does.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

15 minutes ago, Bitterthorn said:

It is absolutely likely they are using the programmable search engine, but I wouldn't know for sure unless someone from LL has spoken about it openly. 

That said, the key word there is programmable. However the search works for SL will be wholly unique to SL.

Hi!  here we go http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Search_API 

[Dragon Mommy]

1 minute ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Hi!  here we go http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Search_API 

Oh perfect. Though now to resist finding ways to improve my Sim's SEO. 🤔 I already spent enough time in my day job with that. 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

44 minutes ago, Bitterthorn said:

Oh perfect. Though now to resist finding ways to improve my Sim's SEO.  🤔  I already spent enough time in my day job with that. 

they have made sure it's not able to be done hehe.   

[Finite]

3 hours ago, Wili Clip said:

If its has been recently. Do you have a link maybe or know where? Thank you \O.. O/

Not recent at all. Here's a link from a post back in 2017. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Scripted_Agent_Status. Who knows how long the wiki's been up. I recall it being around 2010ish when they revamped the search to not be weighted toward heavy traffic.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Finite

[Silent Mistwalker]

31 minutes ago, Finite said:

Not recent at all. Here's a link from a post back in 2017. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Scripted_Agent_Status. Who knows how long the wiki's been up. I recall it being around 2010ish when they revamped the search to not be weighted toward heavy traffic.

 

 

You'll find it at the bottom of every Wiki page. 

Quote

• This page was last modified on 30 January 2014, at 08:11.

 

[Finite]

15 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

 

You'll find it at the bottom of every Wiki page. 

 

Yes I saw that but it just says when it was modified. Doesn't say when it was created. I don't think I was playing in 2014. Think I stopped playing around 2013 so it must have been at least before that when they implemented the change. I'm not dead set on 2010, that's just when I vaguely remember it.

[Silent Mistwalker]

10 minutes ago, Finite said:

Yes I saw that but it just says when it was modified. Doesn't say when it was created. I don't think I was playing in 2014. Think I stopped playing around 2013 so it must have been at least before that when they implemented the change. I'm not dead set on 2010, that's just when I vaguely remember it.

 

Sorry. I misunderstood.  Check the tabs at the top of the page. Scripted agents were on the grid before then end of 2009.

[Qie Niangao]

So much anti-bot prejudice! 

Personally, I find equally appealing those sims with many bots as those with many fish game players. 

[Rowan Amore]

4 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

So much anti-bot prejudice! 

Personally, I find equally appealing those sims with many bots as those with many fish game players. 

Touche!

[Wili Clip]

14 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

So much anti-bot prejudice! 

Personally, I find equally appealing those sims with many bots as those with many fish game players. 

We have anti bot policy and are strictly enforcing it in our games. We have someone who used to work as an admin in Ultima Online game. He brought lots of experience into our community management & cheat prevention. I don't have anything against bots or automated software as long as it is being used legitimately and not for cheating systems that are designed to serve and benefit humans.

I'd maybe like to softly nudge LL to more actively enforce their policy on prevention of land traffic gaming / inflating with bots. As I wrote in initial post even small increase in it would lead towards larger benefits for general SL community and SL's appeal. And this is not a question of money and if LL is able to afford it. Its a question of a little better organization of it (they already successfully implemented SL moles system and that is a right approach to get a lot of useful work done with min investment).

Edited February 27, 2021 by Wili Clip

[Qie Niangao]

2 minutes ago, Wili Clip said:

We have anti bot policy and are strictly enforcing it in our games.

Oh, no you misunderstand. I'd be fine with bots in your games. They're at least as interesting as the non-bot players.

[Wili Clip]

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Oh, no you misunderstand. I'd be fine with bots in your games. They're at least as interesting as the non-bot players.

Sorry.. I don't understand what you mean or what you want to say. I feel some kind of passive hostility from you. I don't know you and I've never been disrespectful to you.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Wili Clip

[Prokofy Neva]

8 hours ago, Wili Clip said:

Last time I was using SL viewer search to try to find some sims with vibrant communities and when I TP-ed to lands appeared as the top search results I found lands with no people on them or just bots. I always look to tp to lands that on search listing appear on top and with highest traffic number in hope to find people to meet and to talk to. I believe its same case for everyone else. We're in SL mostly to interact with other people while sharing same 3D space/environment. 3D worlds that are empty (SANSAR) fail.

In my opinion SL search is highly dysfunctional and it is not really serving its purpose. I also think general SL community and everyone who cares for Second Life should keep putting this topic in focus.

Let me give a simple example how its indirectly hurting Second Life's growth potential. A new SL Resident uses SL search to try to find a land with community of interest to him. He gets search results clicks and teleports to a few lands and finds all lands empty and no people to interact with. Closes the SL viewer and never uses it again.

I think it is very bad for Second Life that its very hard to find lands through SL search who have genuine real human traffic and communities. It hurts SL. Bots traffic manipulation is the biggest reason why SL search doesn't really work and can not serve its main function of connecting individual with communities based on keywords of interest.

I think if LL appointed at least 1 employee or just even 1 - 2 work hours a day for someone to be checking if there are bots (bot traffic gaming) going on in the TOP 10 listed lands on search it would considerably improve the SL search user experience (no matter what kind of algorithm is employed as long as its based on trying to showcase genuine foot traffic - where most people hang out).
(If the problem is money - it can be solved by organizing willing and caring participants from SL community to do that in similar fashion as SL moles are organized).

I always liked to take perspective of Second Life as sort of 3D internet and SL lands/sims as websites. In Second Life you want to be able to find communities that you would like to take part in. It needs to be easy, fast and convenient. If new people coming to SL can fast find communities that they can get integrated in that also contributes helping to solve the player/user retention rate (a problem LL management should in my opinion always keep highest on list of priorities).

Just imagine if Google search was listing websites who artificially inflate their visitors numbers with bots. How fast do you think Google would loose their search engine market share against others who focus on preventing that? In early days Google managed to become the most successful search engine company because Larry Page and Sergey Bring managed to come up with a website ranking algorithm (I think its also based on points / score) that helps highest value information providing websites be ranked higher per keyword. Google and other search engines improved what most people understand under "internet" and search engines became synonym with internet while internet as TCP/IP and many other protocols is much more than that.

So to improve Second Life in the perspective that it can be seen as sort of 3D web where the main goal is to connect people with various interests with communities of their interest. There are so many communities in Second Life - it is amazing. The sad thing is that many of those communities are not represented. Many communities could be bigger and stronger if Linden Lab can improve tech for people find them more easily.

Second Life is not all about the community. Second Life is all about communities. There are many!

Top SL destinations and special editor picks in my opinion are also unfair and any system that depends on being featured land on landowners own submission (but that is a topic for a whole new topic and discussion).

Hope my topic that I am opening can lead towards a positive, healthy and productive discussion. Linden Lab is an OK company and the people working in this company and even the owners are constantly changing. But there is 1 thing that is always staying and that is us the users. As users we shouldn't vilify the company just because it isn't doing something that we think or consider should be done or did mistakes in past. Lets try as a community to gently push them in the right direction.

Be positive always. I always say positivity is a constructive force while negativity is destructive force. SL is full of dreamers and builders. If we want to build and grow we need to be positive. \O.. O/

None of this is relevant now because Search is broken in deep and diverse ways now for nearly three months, and only works on the third-party viewers. Since most of the user population uses them, they haven't suffered needlessly, but we can't be sure: getting the figures on how many people use the SL and how many use the TPV viewers, and how long the log-in sessions are, information that was readily given to us by Lindens 15 years ago is now no longer given and is a trade secret because -- Silicon Valley. 

The Lindens changed search in Viewer 2 in ways that some of us felt were egregious and ruined the world, and set it up for a decade of an inflationary gatcha and sales event economy which are like empty calories only eliminated by occasional but radical inexplicable inventory loss and LinDex devaluation.

Putting the Google appliance on this small world with its finite list of objects was not a rational activity, when the My Squirrel or whatever the other format they had was called worked so much better, but Google appliances are what Silicon Valley bien-pensant must use, not Their Squirrels.

The Zen koan I have finally understood today after 10 years, however (seriously) is that wailing and gnashing my teeth over seizing Viewer 1.23 out of my cold, dead hands and ruining the economy was something that was only sort of happening at a theoretical level, and only incompletely in some sectors because underneath that, er, "narrative" was the actual functioning of Viewer 1.23's search tel quel tucked into TPVs (as we're constantly told, there is Legacy Search and Web Search both in the TPVs -- and we don't know the numbers of who uses what but from my very incomplete public surveys at the Moth Temple in Iris, in fact many people use search/places and not search/all or search/land.)

I estimate 90% of the user population uses Firestorm and that means the world economy was secretly rescued because people had a normal search to find things and buy them or interact with them. This is my operating hypothesis today as I attempt to contemplate  two statements by Oz Linden made to me, one in 2010 and the other in 2021 (I won't get into them now), the bookends of which could only have been the most intense suffering a man could endure as he laboured on a product only 10% of the user base used,  through regular floggings at a "pro-sumer" project that maintained outreach to TPV developers who 90% of the user population did use, but which the Lab didn't brand, to maintain a safe social distance.

I mean, even IBM or Intel, with their legions of script kiddies and code cowboys working for free on open source tools that these giants monetarize and make bank with inside their proprietary boxes, even as they never hire those nerds, wouldn't dare to run a brazenly exploitative program like that involving child labour, metaphorically speaking.

The Lindens always kept the secret formula of their search secret, and didn't tell you if they still counted bots; if they automatically blocked Prokofy's rentals; or if they perversely put Prokoy's rentals at the top of the list even though they were $35 rinky-dink skyboxes above a land-locked pink mountain "just because". Ostensibly they didn't count traffic bots posing as "mannequins" that were needed to "show" the adult furniture but maybe they did.

As Oz and his crew completed the Uplift, as it is reverently dubbed, Search broke. It broke as they fixed some other thing, I forget what. The last time Search was broken in 2018, within 30 hours, which seemed a lifetime back then as all kinds of people refunded because I couldn't find their names to talk to them, it was FIXED. And not just FIXED but the third leg of the Troika, who had been knighted, called me personally to ask if it was working for me now as I searched for my glorious people's rentals.

Now, while I yelled and screamed on the forums for one week, three weeks, nine weeks, SEARCH REMAINED BROKEN. Oldbies ridiculed me and said it wasn't broken -- but they're on Firestorm. Lindens answering the tickets at first said it wasn't broken and I didn't know how to pull down the right lever; then they surprisingly admitted that their engineers were in fact working on it. The bit about how land not even put in search was showing up in long lists of 5238 returns was something that I thought they should be particularly concerned about because it involved privacy which they value, in a way. Days -- weeks -- months have gone by while I dealt with one Linden who seemed skeptical until (I think) I told her to look up her own name on the bog standard SL viewer and notice how it provide 5,238 returns -- and not her. Now while she does not provide customer service inworld (none of them do, and that's fine), maybe she would like to, oh, I don't know, contact other Lindens? Have certain categories of customers to be able to find her. It might be that the Lab maintains its own personnel communication system outside the viewer but I've never seen or head evidence of that.

Now this Linden was more motivated to apologize for the delay, to say it was being worked on -- and again, that's fine. I don't need it to be fixed. I need the problem to be validated. That truly is all. I need people not to tell me something isn't broken when it is, and I need them to admit that there are some particular bad features of that like privacy busting, and put up a good front of having "their engineers" work on it.

Fast forward another month and this Linden then said it was fixed, and could I test it. But it wasn't fixed. The issue of parcels NOT in search/places and paid for with the $30 AD YES IT IS AN AD BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT, YES now did not seem to show up, although I found some today (like the map lag, which is still very severe, they could merely be unchecked parcels not yet registering in the system which can take 24 hours even on a good day).

But her name, or my rentals, or your search for cats in breeding barns and gatchas on yard sales still turned up thousands of answers. That's not "expected behaviour". That's not normal. 

I enclosed screenshots from how searches on my business name turned up 100 on the Firestorm or Alchemy viewer, God bless it, and thousands on the bog standard SL viewer latest iteration called, oh, I dunno, GogolMogol. (I warned them, never to use that name).

This was conceded as a Thing and a Known Issue. After more weeks of no reply (and that's fine, I'm still going to give them five stars and a long lunch) I decided to ask Wendi Linden of of that hybrid warfare machine known as Moncierge. I can't get to Wendi's office hours as they hit at times when I have to work or go to appointments, during what is known as the 'work day' but that's fine, I just decided to IM her a short query and she graciously responded in real time that yes, search was borken  and on the list to fix along with map tiles, group chat, etc.

So that's good, all you need is validation, but here's the thing. It finally dawned on me -- I am very slow -- that what's going on here is not that search is "being fixed by our engineers". "Our engineers" fixed it in 30 hours in 2018. If there is more complexity today (see my rock collection explanation), it might take 3 days or 30 days but we are now into 90.

It was then I was forced to concede that we are now in what doctors used to say in the Traumatic Brain Unit about my son who had t-boned a bus and was in a coma and then babbling nonsense, "This may be his new normal." (Fortunately, not one to accept new normals, I, his sister, our relatives, and his friends remained round the clock for months on end and got him speaking normally again in not exactly the King's English, but in the waazup bro dialect he learned in his fabulous NYC school system. Today, he is happily married and running a business with his wife and has 87% supenation in an arm that once had 27 rods in it placed by a famous white male doctor who left in paralyzed, until, with some lobbying by Chinese and Russian health care workers, we got them quietly removed in a third surgery by a brilliant Black female doctor whose surgery was a work of art. Such are the times.

So yes, but I want to tell you about my final epiphany today that occurred as I personally wrestled with this slew of Google Ad Sense messages in my Gmail box about my blog sites which I hadn't read for weeks because I'm busy, telling me I have to change the scripts by March because line search ads are being removed.

When we finally see Search come out from surgery in...June? We may find that Native Ads and AutoAds now appear in the middle of the search returns the way they do now on many blog and social media sites, including those annoying THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT adds on YouTube. We may never see clean, neat lines of returns under 100 in our lives. 

There's more to this epiphany that involves a wake-up call from the TPVs who realize they are thrown under the bus (Lucy: football) and a planned new Outreach Program to soothe their ruffled feathers and roll up their deprecated viewers through which one can no longer see the wonders of SL.

I'm likely wrong about every bit of this but it could be something like it.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Finite]

I never thought of search as something people relied heavily on to get around SL.

And if you're some sim or property owner that isn't getting  traffic it likely has nothing to do with the search engine no matter how many keywords you put in the description.

I don't see the issue here. I mean, worse case scenario, there's a bunch of sims with bots luring new players because they're on top of some traffic list. I feel like they'd just end up being the first places new players decide not ever to visit again once they realize it's nothing but bots.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Finite

[Tari Landar]

I need to preface this with.....no hostility, no grudges, no hate, no denigration, whatever else, intended, just merely facts and information. 

The main reason people likely believe (whether they are wrong or right in their assumption) you're posting about this, has very little to do with the whole of sl, but rather focuses primarily on your own personal business model. You sell products on the basis of increasing traffic for landowners/renters, and the like. (again, not denigrating your business, it can be a solid business model, please don't get your hackles up about it). Unfortunately, this type of business model relies quite heavily on traffic being far more significant.

Traffic has not been significant for a very long time. There is no changing this, LL has made up their mind, has stated countless times why they made up their mind, has discussed how things were going to change, when they changed, and has discussed it ad nauseum since then. Traffic is never going to hold the significance you desire again, because LL does not want it to. One needn't work for LL to know this is a fact, because LL has told us it's a fact. All the wishing and hoping it were not a fact, won't change things.

People do still purchase and use your products, they can be helpful for exposure, primarily when coupled with other events/existing businesses and not singularly left out without such, but semi-effective much of the time otherwise as well. Though truth be told, without doing events, and offering more of your products, landowners aren't quite as successful as those that do (which is expected behavior, of course)/ Gimmicks work, both in virtual reality and actual reality, and these are a gimmick like any other, that's not a bad thing, but it is what they are, much like sales, events, etc.. are all gimmicks too. People still do use and purchase other similar products that also boast the selling point of increasing traffic. They do increase temporary traffic to some extent, and certainly exposure (which really should be your primary selling point, to be honest...because it's WAY more important and means far more to the average being than traffic which it seems everyone but you knows, is of no significance), although in varying amounts. What they don't do, at least not very successfully, is increase one's standing in search because traffic plays little to no role in that these days and hasn't, as I mentioned above, for quite a long time. This goes doubly so for the broken search some folks seem hell bent on using. They also don't increase overall traffic, for the very same reason. The only time most people pay attention to actual traffic numbers next to their search queries is when using the legacy search and specifically sorting via traffic number (one can surmise they may think higher traffic increases likelihood that people might be present). Still, those numbers don't always, or even usually, mean what people think they do. I can search for rock club right now, find a whole lot of places that have high(er) traffic numbers, that are actually empty or mostly empty much of the day and night. One 2-4 hour event will increase their traffic number quite significantly if numerous people are there for, we'll say an hour or more each. That doesn't mean the overall general traffic of that place is high, it just means it was for X amount of time, and Y number of people helped get those numbers there. BUt, again, most folks don't use even the legacy search in this manner, so traffic numbers will mean very little to them. 

This is what people are trying to explain to you...what you want traffic numbers to mean, isn't what LL wants them to mean, nor is it what LL has set them up to mean. If they did mean what you wanted them to mean, selling your products on the basis of increasing traffic would be quite truthful, and also even far more successful endeavor then you've already got on your hands (which, is, as I said before, already quite successful). As it stands, however, because traffic isn't as significant as you want it to be, or think it should be, the increase traffic line is, while still truthful, a bit of a stretch.  If you instead focus on the exposure (which is not actually the same thing as traffic) your products can give, you can stop all this worrying about traffic significance which LL has stated numerous times is never going to change. LL is, after all, the ultimate authority and while they may be piss poor at doing plenty of things, I'm a firm believe that they probably know more about how they should handle traffic than you do, given that you didn't even know traffic significance changed over a decade ago, lol. 

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Finite said:

I never thought of search as something people relied heavily on to get around SL.

And if you're some sim or property owner that isn't getting  traffic it likely has nothing to do with the search engine no matter how many keywords you put in the description.

I don't see the issue here. I mean, worse case scenario, there's a bunch of sims with bots luring new players because they're on top of some traffic list. I feel like they'd just end up being the first places new players decide not ever to visit again once they realize it's nothing but bots.

For the 100th time, this isn't about my property or whether I get traffic because I have no goal of getting traffic, that's not what I do. I don't run stores or clubs that need to get traffic to get noticed. I'm not a wannabee who is grumbling about my low-traffic parcel and blaming the Lindens for business failures.

Yes, I'd like land that I pay 30L a week for to show up in search in a normal fashion with a exact-word search. That's not about traffic. Traffic is what you seek if you run a shoe store and you want YOUR shoes to show lines above the other guy's shoes on generic shoe searches. I'm talking about informational searches that you use to find an exact place with an exact name so you can get there. It may or may not be about a sale; it's more about showing up in search you paid to show up in merely as a list.

I also disagree that people do not rely on Search. Every time someone comes into my rental and pays money into a rental box I asked them how they found this. And most of the time they say:

"SEARCH".

"SEARCH".

They don't say "classifieds" -- I ask to distinguish this. They sometimes say "My friend recommended it" (that's word of mouth, theoretically the greatest form of sales, which in fact is far less a reason than SEARCH.

Sometimes they might have read your profile picks. Sometimes they might have seen a wall ad you placed in a store for a weekly ad. Sometimes they walk or drive by and *gasp*, once, the only time in my entire SL that I ever recall, someone who was a live breathing human being in avataric form came by in a pod ride and rented a cabin of mine.

But the lion's share of answers are:

"SEARCH".

Then you ask "but search/all or search/places" -- search/places would have give them a cleaner experience and shorter list to peruse; but they say:

"SEARCH/ALL".

Next study what people do after they rent and are looking for something. They look for a club. A store. A forest. An art who in...

"SEARCH"

If people would be honest about this and record how many times a day they use SEARCH they'd be surprised.

Many people think they live in a world where someone else TPs them in, or they use landmarks or they sit on their sim all day in IMs.

But in fact they use SEARCH more than they realize.

Traffic bots are technically banned but they are creeping back. Anyone who sees a venue with unmoving piles of green dots and some fantastic total on the "about land" menu understands this is not organic.

The myriad kinds of bots appearing now is a separate subject and I have some ideas about that. They may or may not be related to changes in Search.

[Finite]

Have you tried promoting your business at all? I see land places routinely sponsoring events or making posts to get their names out there. Relying on search is not the answer. SL search is not very good. Also, for 30L a week or whatever it is, you're not going to get Google quality search. The marketplace search is even worse. For what it's worth, I initially found my land through a listing here on the forums. And the same place sponsors events I regularly attend.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Finite

[Prokofy Neva]

1 minute ago, Tari Landar said:

I need to preface this with.....no hostility, no grudges, no hate, no denigration, whatever else, intended, just merely facts and information. 

The main reason people likely believe (whether they are wrong or right in their assumption) you're posting about this, has very little to do with the whole of sl, but rather focuses primarily on your own personal business model. You sell products on the basis of increasing traffic for landowners/renters, and the like. (again, not denigrating your business, it can be a solid business model, please don't get your hackles up about it). Unfortunately, this type of business model relies quite heavily on traffic being far more significant.

Traffic has not been significant for a very long time. There is no changing this, LL has made up their mind, has stated countless times why they made up their mind, has discussed how things were going to change, when they changed, and has discussed it ad nauseum since then. Traffic is never going to hold the significance you desire again, because LL does not want it to. One needn't work for LL to know this is a fact, because LL has told us it's a fact. All the wishing and hoping it were not a fact, won't change things.

People do still purchase and use your products, they can be helpful for exposure, primarily when coupled with other events/existing businesses and not singularly left out without such, but semi-effective much of the time otherwise as well. Though truth be told, without doing events, and offering more of your products, landowners aren't quite as successful as those that do (which is expected behavior, of course)/ Gimmicks work, both in virtual reality and actual reality, and these are a gimmick like any other, that's not a bad thing, but it is what they are, much like sales, events, etc.. are all gimmicks too. People still do use and purchase other similar products that also boast the selling point of increasing traffic. They do increase temporary traffic to some extent, and certainly exposure (which really should be your primary selling point, to be honest...because it's WAY more important and means far more to the average being than traffic which it seems everyone but you knows, is of no significance), although in varying amounts. What they don't do, at least not very successfully, is increase one's standing in search because traffic plays little to no role in that these days and hasn't, as I mentioned above, for quite a long time. This goes doubly so for the broken search some folks seem hell bent on using. They also don't increase overall traffic, for the very same reason. The only time most people pay attention to actual traffic numbers next to their search queries is when using the legacy search and specifically sorting via traffic number (one can surmise they may think higher traffic increases likelihood that people might be present). Still, those numbers don't always, or even usually, mean what people think they do. I can search for rock club right now, find a whole lot of places that have high(er) traffic numbers, that are actually empty or mostly empty much of the day and night. One 2-4 hour event will increase their traffic number quite significantly if numerous people are there for, we'll say an hour or more each. That doesn't mean the overall general traffic of that place is high, it just means it was for X amount of time, and Y number of people helped get those numbers there. BUt, again, most folks don't use even the legacy search in this manner, so traffic numbers will mean very little to them. 

This is what people are trying to explain to you...what you want traffic numbers to mean, isn't what LL wants them to mean, nor is it what LL has set them up to mean. If they did mean what you wanted them to mean, selling your products on the basis of increasing traffic would be quite truthful, and also even far more successful endeavor then you've already got on your hands (which, is, as I said before, already quite successful). As it stands, however, because traffic isn't as significant as you want it to be, or think it should be, the increase traffic line is, while still truthful, a bit of a stretch.  If you instead focus on the exposure (which is not actually the same thing as traffic) your products can give, you can stop all this worrying about traffic significance which LL has stated numerous times is never going to change. LL is, after all, the ultimate authority and while they may be piss poor at doing plenty of things, I'm a firm believe that they probably know more about how they should handle traffic than you do, given that you didn't even know traffic significance changed over a decade ago, lol. 

No one could ever believe your statements of good will after the constant stream of venom you've unleashed on the forums but I don't care. It's precisely because I don't rely on traffic that I am raising the brokenness of search because it cannot be used to find things. You cannot seem to grasp that there is a world not just of greedy land barons and mendacious merchants trying to get INTO search by gaming traffic to get on top of it, but of ordinary people and a landlord who  uses search to manage properties using search TO FIND THINGS. They are two different functions. My already, existing paying tenants who already pay me money and don't need me to pitch ads to them and force myself into their view cannot find the OTHER properties I have so they can MOVE AROUND IN THEM. People using my FREE land preserve cannot go from one to another because the DIRECTORY IS BROKEN. I cannot MANAGE my land for 30L per parcel instead of paying rapacious web-based rental systems to scrape my business information for their purposes unknown. I can't do the ordinary, every day thing everyone does which is type in MARDI GRAS when you want to find a plate of cupcakes with little crowns on them. Typing in "APPLE FALL" on some bad broken days of search give me apple farms and autumn picnic locations but not that famous store. That's being broken. That's not normal. That is not about traffic.

What you are not grasping whatsoever is that none of my concern is about TRAFFIC and showing up in a list FIRST. That is completely unrelated to anything whatsoever. I am completely uninterested in any number on the corner of my parcels of land which are almost never over 100 or 200, i.e. irrelevant. I am not talking about traffic, which is needed to show up on search. I AM TALKING ABOUT SEARCH AS A DIRECTORY TO FIND THE ANSWER TO QUERIES USING EXACT PHRASES.

It is about FINDING A RETURN ON AN EXACT NAME SEARCH AND GETTING A SHORT LIST OF RETURNS TO TRAVEL TO THOSE LOCATIONS. I could post the different screenshots of what results on the TPVs (and used to result on the SL viewer) and its neat and crisp of 100 or 120 lines showing "Ravenglass Rentals" at 100 locations. I could contrast that with a search on the broken viewer with "Ravenglass Rentals" that shows up 5237 items with other people's rentals (that never happened if the search was for RAVENGLASS), things that aren't rentals at all (random pieces of land not put in search)

I don't care if I show up on a search for "rentals" because...I don't. There are too many rentals in SL and you can't seem to grasp the enormity of this field of data and the very limited possible. Your nattering on and on with this hectoring, superior tone about traffic as if I was running a fishing game with magic fishing poles wanting to get noticed more than the other guy with magic fishing poles and obsessed with traffic like a witless child lets me know that you just can't grasp the simple problem here: search is about finding things. It's the other side of the equation. It's not about getting into search to be noticed by others finding things. I want to find "Poland" when I type in "Poland" and not 6000 things that are mainly not "Poland".

I realize this isn't something you can believe or trust because you are so skewed toward cynical hatred here, but I am not concerned about exposure. I don't need to go to weekend Ted talks to learn from other businesses in a business incubator about how I can maximize my traffic. I have too many customers and can't handle them all because I can't stay online all day. That's why they are on SELF-SERVICE so I do not need "exposure". If they come by using search and can read a notecard at a 12-year-old's level, they have found themselves a home because I have open land, with open groups -- try to imagine such a fantastic thing.

I used to have a big apartment building that had a sign downstairs that said 'YOU MUST READ AT A 12 YEAR OLD'S LEVEL AND BE ABLE TO RIGHT CLICK ON A BUTTON TO LIVE IN THIS APARTMENT AND IF YOU CANNOT PLEASE LEAVE." That got their attention. I can't tell you the millions of people who called me to ask if I could send them a group invite to see the apartments -- they were open and they didn't need them like they do in so many island bunkers. I can't tell you how many people can't right click on a teleport button and go to the floor numbered. I can't tell you how many people can't grasp through the naked eye, let alone through a zoom with ctr-shift, that the first floor of this box in a virtual world is absolutely identical to the other 12 boxes stacked above it to make homes so that they already know what those floors look like. I tore down that building long ago because it was too crazy-making listening to uneducated entitlement happy brats all day who could not read at a 12-year-old's level, figure out that the box they were in was like the other boxes, right click on a button, and go up to a floor and pay a rental cube.

When you have cheap rentals, you really don't need Search. Search comes to you spilling through every crack, flying, walking, TP'd in by girlfriends fresh from the disco floor. That is, ,you don't need Search to be TRAFFIC -- A SEPARATE CONCEPT ENTIRELY -- to be discovered, putting you at the top of the list. What you need is SEARCH -- real, functional search, so that a person looking in a DIRECTORY can see, oh, that one is the waterfront for $200, but that other one is the skybox for $700, one is in mature, the other is in PG, hmm, what should I pick. It's search for -- wait for it! -- INFORMATION enabling CHOICE which is already AFTER a warm leader and often even after a sale, because what I try to maximize is moving from one house to another by RETURNING the cancellation fee so that the tenant isn't bilked out of a day's rent because they found something they liked better.

Your horrifically condescending screed about what "people are trying to tell me" about "traffic not meaning anything" and how I need to "make a better product to be attractive" is so irrelevant to the issue I am highlighting here that I've explained adequately and you have failed to understand for 3 months that it's almost not worth bothering. Your little haughty lecture is applicable to some guy named Phil with an adult furniture store and mannequins in the back going through the routines who can't get noticed because another guy named Fred has swankier beds or prettier models. It's a lecture I've given in less snarky form myself even to my own tenants renting stores. "Traffic doesn't make sales," I tell them with my eternal mantra. "Sales make sales." I do not offer traffic on my malls -- imagine, malls, completely obsolete in many ways, due to merchant events, still functioning, and still useful to people simply because they are modest creators not at the level of the high class merchant events and without the capacity to invest in advertising campaigns or staff. I make areas where people can start a business or have a modest little gatcha resale or decorating operation and not lose their revenue to my rent. We don't need traffic. We don't get traffic. Traffic is not for sale here. A directory that enables them to find a key word that says "Christmas gatchas" or "modern at work" or "antique furniture" is what is needed for INFORMATION, not traffic. INFORMATION helps make a sale, but at a later, more sophisticated end of the equation than you are prepared to admit exists. No one will come to any property of mine because they found me on top of search -- I'm not there and don't try to be there.

They find me because they are searching for jello moulds from a gatcha machine and if one of my little stores happens to specialize in 1950s kitchenware, their key word will show up somewhere in the middle or bottom of a list. The searches for yard sale, gatcha, kitchen wares will not bring them to my property. The search "1950s jello mould" might.

Now, if I was going to make a haughty, condescending critique of my own operation, I could do it better than you by far. I could say, Prokofy, why make the Lindens provide your property management tools for you and your tenant finding aids for you? Buy a system that you run from the web with all your properties hyper-texted for your tenants to find online. Organize their hops around your properties with a web based inventory management system by the major monopolist of SL, or if you don't want to spend on that lag monster scraping data not to invade privacy but to maximize business opportunities (let's say), then use a customized or proprietary system that merely lets your people teleport around without using Lindens' broken search. Totem poles with arrow signs on them like the RP sims.

And I would reply to such a critique: but I have that TOO. These are businesses where you have to have multiple redundancies built in. You have to have search/places (or did when it worked); you have to have classifieds, you have to have signboards and portal boards from your office; you have to have your Picks; you have to have word-of-mouth, etc. etc. Everyone knows that. You must not have ever tried to run a business like this or you would grasp that in the rentals business, search, even on a good day, in this crowded field, is only one of a variety of ways that will produce a sale. 

But search has to work for people to find things, and not only to give me or somebody else a sale, but for them to explore or socialize. It's the normal life blood of a community, and one that the Lindens have expressed astounding indifference to for the last 10 years since Viewer 1.23. The Lindens want people to buy products on the Marketplace so they get the commission. They want people to buy servers.  They don't care if underneath that other people try to sell breedables or rentals. They don't feel the need to facilitate this at all. I think they should not because this is my business; I chose this business because it illustrates a principle of civil society that I wish to promote in a philosophical way in virtual worlds -- the free movement of goods, services, and ideas across frontiers. It's something so completely not about "traffic" in this vulgar way you conceive it as Crazy Eddie's Prices Which Are Insane for him to make a buck off a rube that I don't know where to start.

When you say in your final effort at a beatdown is in fact only revealing your own vulnerability -- that the Lindens know about traffic and I don't need to know; that they long ago dumbed down and crippled traffic by not making it work as it does on Google, even with a Google appliance; that they weight Marketplace searches in particular in obvious ways that serve their own corporate and social interests, you've completely missed the boat. I don't care that they do all those things because I don't need traffic, once again for the zillionth time. I need directories that work for people to search for what they are looking for. The inability for some people to admit that 30L payments for Search/Place ads are in fact ads even if they are not $100,000 classifieds is indicative. They are closer to a fee for a service to be in a minimal director rather than an investment in the attention economy that works in a rinky-dink toy world, but they are still an ad

The Lindens are usually in better faith and nicer than anybody on the forums, and they know it's broken and say it's broken without this sort of condescension that even Oz used with me 10 years ago but had shed by the time he left. They grasp that there is no traffic on my land because they've seen it for years. They know where I'm showing up in the rentals key word search -- nowhere, or at the end of the 5627-line chain. They know it's about communities where people want to be able to go from one place to another like on a train or bus using teleports and be able to find a willing buyer if they are a willing seller with key words, not traffic inflation.

I think you must not have read my posts from years even before you were born about how the Lindens changed how traffic worked because it was gamed with camping and bots and pick sales. I was one of the people lobbying AGAINST bots. I am not a guy named Phil or Fred grumbling about how my traffic pumping tricks got undermined. I never had them. I didn't have camping chairs and don't now -- who can afford to pay them out?! Search is crippled in terms of traffic now in funny ways, but still, if there is a furry club that has a traffic of 100,000 because they have good music and friendship -- not bots -- and another furry club where the people are mean and the beer has run out and only has 50,000, people can see what is on top and go to the 100,000 club. Traffic, while crippled and changed and jerked out of position to save its soul, still renders meaning at least at that primitive level.

I personally think it's fair to ask the Lindens to enable a functioning search so that I can MANAGE my land (something you can't even grasp or admit here, so obsessed are you with this primitive caricature of a loser out of touch with 10-year-old search realities who can't realize their shabby motel cabins will never gather traffic because of their peeling paint). I don't think I should have to pay for third-party tools or depart from the immersion of the virtual world to manage inworld land on an external web site. That gets costly. I think it's fair to ask the Lindens to provide the Residents with a directory where they can look up jello moulds or rainbow unicorns and TP right to them, whether they have 0 traffic or 100,000 traffic on their land description. This is so far away and really so far above your snarky "traffic" take on this that it's really not worth discussing with you in particular at all. I've gone to the length of answering this so that any others interested, and most importantly Lindens WHO TELL ME THEY ARE WORKING ON FIXING SEARCH AND NOT THAT I NEED TO WORK ON MY TRAFFIC PUMPING SKILLS, HELLO.

I do suspect that this is taking so long because they are changing the nature of search again and adding Google like features which I think are inappropriate for this tiny world. But I'm not a coder or a platform provider and there's a lot I don't know. They changed search 10 years ago because it skewed the economy for them as it was gamed and did not enable them to create real value and meaning in the economy which you need if people don't head for the exits. They grasp that people don't want to buy bad hair in ugly boxes with 100 bots perched on top of them just because they are on the top of the search page. Many sales happen today at stores THAT DO NOT EVEN PUT THEMSELVES IN SEARCH AT ALL. They don't need to, they have GROUPS which is how they make sales WHICH ARE BROKEN TOO and an entirely other story. Many sales happen at scheduled events, recurring or one-time, which people find through EXTERNAL BLOGS and not SEARCH. This conversation is about something else. It is about how there is no telephone book or directory of services in the yellow pages in this city.

 

[SiennaKeti]

Yeah LL should remove the traffic concept. Sl lovers will still hang around and enjoy SL. That will get rid of traffic  bots and pyramid game scammers who charge high taxes and trying to make their own bitcoin like currency and cashing on weakness of players

[Prokofy Neva]

9 minutes ago, Finite said:

Have you tried promoting your business at all? I see land places routinely sponsoring events or making posts to get their names out there. Relying on search is not the answer. SL search is not very good. Also, for 30L a week or whatever it is, you're not going to get Google quality search. The marketplace search is even worse. For what it's worth, I initially found my land through a listing here on the forums. And the same place sponsors events I regularly attend.

Read what I have posted and try to grasp that you don't tell someone who has been in SL for 17 years with thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of square meters across the mainland over 50 sims (where I share land with neighbours I've cultivatted for years) "Have you tried promoting your business?" 

I'm the best known or second best known Mainland rentals business and I don't have to look for people to come to my rentals. They are coming to my office and renting my places all day long -- ask them. Look at them. Every concert or event I go to, I see

With search broken the last three months, I have not lost business, and losing business or wanting to be king here is not what is driving my demand. I compensate for broken things as I always have in SL by using classified, wall signs in other stores, participation in merchant events in addition to search, and with COVID, I think there is more business than ever, although COVID also drives down people's budgets and I need to put out more and cheaper rentals.

This isn't about promotion. It's something more sophisticated than you are prepared to recognize with good will. It's about management, efficiency, normalcy, building a connected Internet world with hypertext to increase knowledge and socializing. That may not be something you believe in; you'd like to believe everybody is hustling a buck. You may not realize I have a RL job where I making my living and SL is just a side gig for me and always has been. But I want it to work so that for anyone, it could be their main job if they wish, and I want it to work even if someone or myself doesn't need a profit. That's how you make a world. I do want a world. I do not want a platform. The Lindens want to make a platform and are less interested in world-building, but they grasp better than you do that groups, search, map tiles -- these are all things you need to make work even if you are just a platform. They are the minimum oiling of the machine for that platform that enable people to make their own world without Lindens. Lindens are not scorning me but answering my support sickets.

I realize it's fashionable to fly to some camp site or mountain site of mine and gloat , oh, look at this vacancy, it's all vacant spots and hyper texts as one travel blogger said. Well, B&B houses fill up and empty out up and down seasonally or by days of the week and are sometimes all empty and it doesn't matter; the skyboxes and the ground land offered on the same sim is covering the tier; the B&B is an experiment and it needs hypertexted "vacant" or "occupied" signs and their prices so that people can easily see them without waiting for a texture to rez. I'm satisfied with the way it's all running and if it was all with terrible vacancy and lost money, I'd have to close it because I can't afford to subsidize somebody else's Second Life. I'm interested in a functioning society. That needs SEARCH.

I occasionally use the MP for rentals ads but it's not very efficient. I occasionally put an ad on the forums but there is one very organized and prosperous Mainland rentals business with the time and motivation and skill to come on here every day to place ads with keywords -- why compete and try to be seen? Let him get the business and knock himself out to wait on customers -- mine are on self service and can be found by a directory called "Search" if you use the exact name or a key word like "elf hut" -- and if they fall on page 3 or page 10 it doesn't matter -- they are cheap and people come to them. 

Look, girls, stop talking to me like a newbie who doesn't understand Second Life. I think I do know more about this space than you can ever imagine. I am talking about a DIRECTORY for people to FIND THINGS, not me showing up in traffic to hawk my outdated prim hair.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

5 minutes ago, SiennaKeti said:

Yeah LL should remove the traffic concept. Sl lovers will still hang around and enjoy SL. That will get rid of traffic  bots and pyramid game scammers who charge high taxes and trying to make their own bitcoin like currency and cashing on weakness of players

They already did that 10 years ago. Traffic used to be a hugely inflated phenomenon and completely monetarized in the most grotesque way:

the Lindens used to have a system called "dwell," whereby if you collected enough traffic on your parcel, by any gimmicks imagineable, by money trees or camping trees or payouts for picks, you would get a monetary compensation from the Lindens. The Lindens paid you to have an activity in the world, something like our government's stimulus payments. They did this to get the world greased and started. I used to allow that dwell simply to redistribute in my groups, so that by being in my rentals with your friends -- and not by me having traffic bots or camp chairs -- you even got a small cashback.

The Lindens thought there would be art shows and live music and educational discussions; instead there were wet t-shirt contests. So they removed it.

Then people aggressively tried to up their numbers with camping and bots but also every kind of sale and gimmick and event, with all the drama and fist-fighting you can imagine, so they intervened again to make traffic mean less. They tried to use other more "worthy" features of the "folksonomy" as it is called -- formation of picks (as if they weren't bought); length of time; type of key words, whatever their secret sauce is to make search more subtle and sophisticated.

The Lindens tried to shape behaviour with this effort in various ways. I noticed suddenly one week that my rentals -- my little rentals that are nothings -- were topping the search list even though they had 0 traffic and finally realized it was because the word "refundable" was attractive to users, they were looking it up, and I offered this and many landlords didn't. But the wheel turned, they moved on to "jacuzzi" or whatever they moved on to in their tinkering.

Gambling is outlawed in the US online in part to ensure the riches of meatworld casinos so the Lindens in fact do not allow pyramid schemers and scammers -- they are booted from SL. They have a system for legal games of skill which they monitor closely. There isn't bitcoin of any significance in SL. This is a tiny frog pond that isn't that hard to monitor. Your beliefs about things are outdated and not backed up by documented proof.  

But traffic still has to have at least some token presence and token meaning to provide a way for people to distinguish the furry motorcycle joint with the good music from the one with the bad beer. So it is still there.

 

[Finite]

Well if you do promote then maybe its your attitude? Word of mouth is another form of advertising. However it works both ways. Assuming you treat your customers similar to how you talk to people here I'd guess many wouldn't have a lot of good things to say about you. PS Ive been around SL nearly as long as you have. Coming up on 15 years next month. And I'm not sure that 17 years works in your favor. 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

7 minutes ago, Finite said:

Well if you do promote then maybe its your attitude? Word of mouth is another form of advertising. However it works both ways. Assuming you treat your customers similar to how you talk to people here I'd guess many wouldn't have a lot of good things to say about you. PS Ive been around SL nearly as long as you have. Coming up on 15 years next month. And I'm not sure that 17 years works in your favor. 

 

You seem to think that my problem is a drop in business because search is broken and if I become nicer than I am to people who have been horrifically nasty to me for years on end, that I will make more sales.

But I don't need to do that because I don't sell a charming personality, I sell cheap rentals and that's all I need to provide to people searching for cheap rentals. I also sell very nicely decorated niche and theme rentals that a small number of people appreciate and which are fun for me. These activities are aided by search but don't depend on search because advertising, word of mouth, events etc help them as much.

You live in some bubble where you don't realize that 95% of the people inworld don't read the forums so whether I'm nasty or nice doesn't matter. They come and rent my land whether search works or not. Search being broken is a nuisance and makes me have to do other things that are more expensive or a waste of time but ultimately it's not that big a deal because -- WAIT FOR IT HELLO HERE IT COMES

SEARCH IS NOT BROKEN FOR MOST OF THE USERS BECAUSE THEY ARE ON FIRESTORM WHERE IT WORKS AS IT HAS SINCE VIEWER 1.23 10 YEARS AGO.

If you have been here for 15 years you ought to grasp that and understand that my complaining about search being broken and therefore making it a chore to manage my rentals more than it needs to be is a niche concern at some level, for which the Lindens do not need to chip their nails, because 90% of users don't have broken search, they are on Firestorm.

I simply believe that the company should make their branded viewer work as it used to work 3 months ago and many years before that since 2010 -- before which it worked much better. I sense the Lindens must either be so overwhelmed with much more basic issues like keeping sims running and Windlight from glitching that Search is a luxury now OR they have big changes coming to how Search works and they are waiting until the March deadline set by Google to fit into Google's change to line search -- or whatever it is that Google does that affects them, who knows.

Search being broken is a minor problem in a world where for MOST USERS it is not broken because they are on third-party viewers where it isn't. People on third-party viewers are the majority of my customers and they find my rentals in Search and in other ways.

But there are some on the SL viewer by preference and there are some that are newbies -- and there is me, who refuses to go on Firestorm for many reasons -- so that it is enough of a concern that Search doesn't work.

What I realized finally today is that the Lindens have no motivation to fix a thing that their fan base using Firestorm isn't complaining about because it's not broken. Tehy sure as hell don't have any incentive to fix it for me. That's natural and normal. But just as they want to fight for Firestorm and not the official viewer, and want to fight for a list of functions and features, so do I.

[Finite]

I agree that search is broken. But I've never found it to be a hinderance. I play on Firestorm and still don't utilize it much and as I said before Im not a big fan of MP search as it is just as bad. I'd rather go out an about shopping anyways just for something to do. Fair enough if that's just me.

PS Im not sure whats so great about Firestorm search. Do you mean the tab that shows and sorts traffic? Just about anyone who isn't new knows that traffic is bs. I just did a search for the hell of it and had a laugh because the place that came up first I know for a fact is a ghost town.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Finite