Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?

[Solar Legion]

Quoting yourself trying to justify an utterly useless metric as though it is some sort of "answer" to another user's remarks does not change anything, Wili.

"Popularity" is useless and irrelevant. Traffic is just as useless and irrelevant. There is nothing whatsoever you can say or point to, to change that as far as I am concerned.

I will always put more weight on what a place states is there/puts as a description than the Traffic count. This has not changed since my first day within Second Life.

And yes, I would be utterly ecstatic if they removed Traffic as a metric - or at least its display - from the Legacy and Web Search systems entirely.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Solar Legion

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/28/2021 at 12:00 AM, Finite said:

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.

This is a pretty hopeless exercise trying to convince you of these more subtle matters given your bad faith in addressing them and your unwillingness to accept that just because something isn't true for you, not only is it true for other people, but you should care because of larger issues involved.

For you, there's this "tab that shows and sorts by traffic" which you sneer at because you are oh-so-above "traffic" which some girl with big hair and a mesh body and an enormous avatar rendering cost - some culturally inferior entity who may use bots to make her numbers bigger - is the only one who supposedly cares about this tab and these numbers and whether hers are even in the list or at the top of the list.

Traffic becomes a low-brow, even criminal activity that you are too cool to bother with or care. You want to virtue-signal that you are "in the know" that "traffic is BS" and if you see some club with 100,000 "traffic" it must mean they have bots, they have scams, they have pick sales, or who knows what. You are even more superior now that you have discovered that this "ghost town" is fooling all these people with its traffic faked up.

Let's leave aside the issue of big hair, bling, and venues that you feel are not properly rendered as a man-about-town.

There's a whole other universe of information in this same "tab" and other functions, and these are important. Why?

o This form of search organizes searches on exact terms neatly in one line only and in a small enough batch to peruse, i.e. 100 and not 5000. So it's good for housekeeping purposes for your own land your put in search; it's good for socializing purposes if you're someone who only wants to go to Brazilian sims and only on Tuesdays and only with LGBT; it's good for actually finding some specific thing in the welter of search which itself works badly because of a variety of political and technical factors -- that is, Search isn't about traffic in this world, and traffic isn't about search, it's Search-as-Search. 

So just as there is Software-as-a-Service in the tech world and a Thing-in-Itself in the philosophical world, Search-as-Search is a quantity that is not equal to your constricted notion of it.

o This form of Search on "that tab" could be "sorted by traffic," but in many searches for people who use this, the "traffic sort" is merely sorting lots which have, oh, 231 traffic on them from those with 3 7 or those with 0, that is, they aren't important at all because that's not the point. They could sorted alphabetically. Or they could be sorted by traffic just so that you have that little bit of extra-sauce information about them, but in a world in which your list contains items that are like Schenectady, that is, a place you can't spell and is 145 miles from a world-important place that has the highest Search hits in the world, and is never in its life going to have, let's say, certain features, like "best theaters" or "most COVID cases per square mile".

o This smaller batch sorted can yield useful information of various sorts useful for managing rentals; useful from moving from rental to another; useful for finding very, very specific things in a store; useful for exploring sims, etc. etc. They lie outside the realm of gaming traffic, trying to "get in" the list of traffic.

People who don't use search, don't care about search, and become hostile and superior about search and its brokenness usually are having an experience in SL that others don't share and don't want to share. I categorize these people as follows, and if you don't like it, make your own categories:

o The Bored -- these are people who don't get more out of SL, dip into it only occasionally to chat with a friend or cash out their chips or maybe try on a new dress for a minute -- they don't need to look for anything. They looked already in 2007 or 2017 and are done, forever.

o The Gored - these are people who are heavily into an RP that completely absorbs them and they never depart from that realm and never look for things because not only did they find them, it might be forbidden to look for things in their chosen realm. Or, they are totally riveted not with RP, but with some other all consuming passion or activity, like trying to get rare gatchas and flip them, or trying to date the most men they can without revealing their real gender, or something. The "Search Box" for these people isn't the literal one, but groups they join with shifting membership; events they attend; a search device that is far more refined that a Google-type search because it's more like e-mail, and not even like Yelp.

o The Stored - these are people who got the 4096 free for life deal and maybe even patched together an entire sim with it on their alts but then stopped paying for some of them as premiums so now they only have 17,528 meters of land; they have a huge inventory that seems a shame to let go; they put their account on annual and the amount is a rounding error given their income or assets. Let's hope people like this didn't leave anything spinning on their lot because the Lindens won't remove it and never will until the heat-death of the sun. People who closed their inworld shop and put their avatar on "hide" but keep an MP store as they work on Open Sim or play Fortnite also could be literally "Stored".

o The Discorded -- these are people who used to log on and sometimes go shopping or dating but generally it's too laggy and dull doing that actually, not just compared to RL, where nothing may be happen especially in a pandemic, but compared to Twitter. I know several people who used to be in SL all day who are now on Twitter all day and never looked back. These people might have once chatted in sales, or discount, or merchants' or RP or affinity groups all night, if those owners let them, but more likely they moved to Discord because SL groups don't work. I associate Discord with the Sims and various tacky games and such and just enormous amounts of unthreaded conversations and lack of good moderation and insanity. But others get a lot out of it.

o The Blended - these are people who have their nose in Blender all day or all night and make things and upload them and sell them, but the rest of the time they are blended into RL -- their spouse or children or school or real job takes them away from this fairy glen and they don't need to look for anything. They do hope other people need to look for their art works or their 18th French furniture or their breedable hedgehogs, but then they either have staff to take care of that or they just don't care, there's no inworld shop; what shop they have isn't in search at all; or they have long since gone to the MP.

o The Groupies -- these are people who only go to Linden office hours and the beta grid sandbox; or at another end of the social and cultural spectrum only come on to shop at Happy Weekends, may be chat in a group that didn't open a Discord yet, or manage a group they still feel fond of, or perhaps they just go to one music event a week for their favourite performer. I know such people and so do you.

o The IM I AM - these are people who only use SL for IMs. They sit on one sim, or one house, and chat in IMs with people on other sims all day or all night. You wonder why they don't TP to a club, or a house, or a pretty field with pansies in it, and have their chat there, but if they do that, the chat isn't private, there are annoyances, there's lag, there's someone they don't want to see, so staying inside is all they do. They don't search at all. They don't have to. They have calling cards and groups. They don't search for a store they heard of because someone gave them an LM or it's on someone's pick -- folksomy. Their beloved store they will but from at every merchant's event is not even in search/places -- why waste 30L, is perhaps their thinking. (Some people I have advised on how to increase sales marvel at this thing called search/places and are amazed when sales increase.) Why do they need to type words into a box when they have SeraphimSL or some other aggregate site with a SLURL they click on and go right to that event to buy that thing?

It's not that Search is obsolete. It's that categories of people don't use it.

No one believes me when I tell them this because they don't have customers from lots of different countries with lots of different levels of knowledge.

When I tell people to find my other rentals, or perhaps a club they could try by using search/places, "Like Google," I discover they don't use Google and don't know how it works.

How can that be?

Because the ipads or the cheap laptops they bought at the mall have Facebook or a Microsoft browser's landing page pre-set into it, and they just click on those things and don't try to find anything. In some countries of the world, like Uzbekistan, Facebook is sold like a telephone service or a cable subscription, for $5 a month you post on FB. You don't attempt to do anything more so that your family can eat that month, the Internet is metered. In other places, there is no one to provide all the "lore" that comes with class knowledge like "how to use closed quotes on Google" -- they live in a single-parent home or with their grandparents who don't know how to use computers, they have no money to do more than perhaps buy a phone that doesn't encourage searches because it has apps instead.

I remember once years ago I stumbled on this interesting thing, that all these apps had proprietary searchs of things within them that weren't hooked up to Google, thereby undermining Google, if you care about that. So I went up to Marissa Meyer who spoke at that conference and said what did Google think about how search in apps didn't belong to them (yet). And I could tell from her expression that she hadn't thought that through before, and she sort of stumbled, "Well, someone will take care of all that." The way Philip once said to me, "Oh, someone will make that" when I said there wasn't a full perm printing press, or at least transferable papers inworld, crippling free media. That "someone" who went to the search people really do, and put it in Google, was obviously Google.

I don't know if LL is as motivated to look at the search that people really use and then go there, probably not. I remember how intrigued Philip was when I and others like Hamlet nee Linden pointed out to him that "Picks" were not "Picks" but photo albums of people's lives, story boards, and Picks too of course that people constantly checked out on each other's profiles. So I pointed out to him that if he ordered his search to search by what people put in their Picks, I would rise to the top, not because of traffic, which I didn't have, but because many, many people over the years rented a parcel, had their first kiss, built their first house, or put up their 10th breedable barn or 20th motel cabin for working girls and the label on that can, which had their very own personal lives unrelated to me, still said "Ravenglass Rentals" on X sim. What would be on top would not be the top mall with 20 bots on it. Hamlet wrote something thinky about folksonomy but then word got out, and savvier merchants, God bless them, because they need to do everything they possibly can to compensate for the lack of organized, inworld, networked advertising (and no, you there with the billboard blocking the view isn't what I mean), began to sell picks for $2000 or more. Even a purchased picks would be better than the classifieds that go for a fortune as more "authentic" -- until they didn't.

o The Greedy Gamers - these are people who have only one partner, perhaps, or maybe none, but also have a very fiercely guarded small set of friends they've been together with since beta, and with whom they play Greedy. That's it. That's the category.

I so starkly remember the first time I discovered what an "IM" was and what it means to be "in IMs", which was in 1999 in the Sims Online Beta. I wasn't on AOL or the Dungeon; I wasn't on a bulletin board or anything; we didn't have even a computer at our house back in those days of the late 80s and early 90s when people became entranced with those things. In TSO, I chatted in room chat with other people in that room. I teleported to another room and chatted with the other people in that room. If someone IM'd at me while we were in a room at the same time with other people, I was puzzled because I couldn't understand why they didn't talk normally -- and came to associate such IMs with griefers, losers, spammers, etc. harassing you. 

I'll never forget the first time I went to a party on a lot in TSO with the punch bowl and the pool table and the other props, and one man and woman were sitting in chairs very still, hardly moving and not talking. But they didn't fall off line which would happen if you didn't keep yourself going. I asked someone why they were so quiet. He said, "They're in IMs." So I began to associate IMs with catatonic, still people in social situations who would prefer to talk to someone else. Not everyone got the habit of doing all this simultaneously in the early days.

In SL, it is definitely a habit that people chat in IMs, even as they also chat in the room or other IMs or a group; they get the "wrong" window sometimes; but they don't leave their sim. So they may work hard at decorating their space because they will be sitting in it and staring at its 4 walls as if they'd been quarantined in the virtual just like the real world. They don't go out. That would introduce lag and confusion into their fascinating chat. 

But outside this list -- and everyone may have a little bit of these features in their own lives -- there is a thriving metropolis of people who either are Solitary Explorers, or Shoppers, or Adult Club Members, or Book Club readers, or whatever theme or activity there is, so they need to look in Search. Some of these people are served by a search that shows, as I keep saying, the 50,000 Vore Club and the 25,000 Vore Club and enables a choice; others are people looking for 1950 jello moulds. THAT IS SEARCH HELPS RELEVANCE. Being able to sort the kitchen stores that have 500,000 from the 1950 RP sims that don't have things for sale and few go there becomes more possible when it is SORTED BY TRAFFIC.

I could devise categories all day long and try to refine them and think up new ones but I can't emphasize enough. If you're too cool for school and blase about traffic scores, so are most of the people who avidly use search everyday.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Rolig Loon]

15 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

I will always put more weight on what a place states is there/puts as a description than the Traffic count. This has not changed since my first day within Second Life.

That makes sense to me. I don't recall ever looking for a place and judging whether it was worth visiting because of its traffic count. When I use search to find someplace new, I usually scroll through several pages, reading descriptions to figure out what's supposed to be in places that sound interesting.  If there's no description or just a few meaningless keywords, I won't bother visiting. I truly don't care how popular a place is.  What counts is whether they have something I am looking for.

[Prokofy Neva]

10 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Yeah that was my way of asking without asking directly (embarrassment) because I wasn't sure if that were still true. I don't intentionally ask embarrassing question. I do try to word them in such a way that it leaves the other person a way to save face by not giving a full answer. In this case, a simple no. I know Prok doesn't really care, but, well, I do. This planet and everything on it, in it, and around it are all I have and I will fight to the death to preserve it.*

 

 

*One exception. Man made things and it would depend on the thing. Example: Mt Rushmore Monument... bye bye.

Yeah, you're subtle and no one would ever guess that -- not. I don't need to save any face because banning from the JIRA, especially for something like that, can only be an honour. I have no doubt that my ancient victory in getting Lindens to accept the "don't close and keep voting" concept, which fit into their "Tao" in some obscure victory, was reversed and now there's no trace of any of it like an ancient artifact from a lost civilization. Some Lindens gnashed their teeth over me having any kind of successful venture on the JIRA because not only should non-techies not exist in their realm, people who criticized the open source cults should be banned from their realm. 

But for those who don't talk and lurk it's nice to put the record straight on the real issues because they are real. People who still remained in the JIRA when Oz completely ended voting and threatening a banning if they kept objecting about this or anything may have a dim memory of the earlier days; people who came later don't care because they never knew it.

The banning from the forums is even more of a case study. I was banned by one set of Lindens in violation of their ethics and with the help of their groupies; they moved on, and another set of Lindens came and undid this quietly because it was wrong. When I was banned again it was over an absurdity even enemies of mine could see was absurd and might apply to them -- asking a question about why people who reverse-engineered the viewer when it was illegal to do so and not authorized, got to be celebrated and not punished, and blessed after the fact with a viewer project, in a queue of town-hall questions.

That was and remains a valid question and always shall.

The hilarious thing was, when I sat in that town hall, two things happened. One, Cory Linden cheerfully answered my question, because he's less of a cultists than the cultists in his cult, so to speak. The other was that a griefer made a day-old avatar and gave it my name, slightly different, and began sitting down near me, sitting on other people, flapping his wings, speaking out of turn in chat -- of course this is an old griefer technique -- and a flustered Linden reached for the eject button and got me instead -- or knew they could get me that way and their birdie friend could then suddenly behave himself -- or maybe he ejected both of us, who knows.

The Lindens who made these bans were viewed as absurd and aren't here any more -- you find out about these things when that Linden is gone and then you find yourself able to log back into the forums without any trouble, and not because you somehow jimmied the browser or made an alt. That's not the point. You accept that the world works this way, and you are meant to be kept off balance.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Wili Clip]

2 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Quoting yourself trying to justify an utterly useless metric as though it is some sort of "answer" to another user's remarks does not change anything

I quoted logical arguments (I further added and emphasis in bold - that was new text) and even a very simple example to teach general public how keywords work and how traffic is an important metric that gives weight to keywords.

I miss logical reasoning by some commentators here and the use of strong arguments.

One can not say x is not true after I write very strong logical arguments why x is true. One can not just write x is not.  One need to at least give a logical explanation or counter arguments to my arguments.

But this is not a technical/programmer or scientific community and is just public forum where anyone can say 1+1=5 and they reason it with because I said so. ☺️🙄

I will try to give an example more relevant to SL:

Lets say you are using sl search and you type in a keyword "role play". There are 100s maybe 1000s of role play sims in SL. But only few of them are the biggest and have very big community. If the keyword result for "role play" is not weighted against the traffic of the lands that have role play on them you are not going to be able to find a popular sim where you can start role playing (you're going to get 100s of lands that contain keyword role play in their description and name but don't have any actual role play going on on sim or are empty). If the search result page does not give you the list of lands that are listed from most popular to less then search is utterly dysfunctional. You can not have functional search without popularity/traffic metric.

 

I will now just give it a rest and not argue with people who don't use arguments and make claims that are not based on measurable/logically determined reality.

Time for me to sleep.
Wish you all well.  \O.. O/  *Hi5*

Edited March 1, 2021 by Wili Clip

[Vengeance Villota]

28 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This is a pretty hopeless exercise trying to convince you of these more subtle matters given your bad faith in addressing them and your unwillingness to accept that just because something isn't true for you, not only is it true for other people, but you should care because of larger issues involved.

 

Probably because traffic has been irrelevant for about 10 years now. Maybe longer.

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Vengeance Villota said:

Probably because traffic has been irrelevant for about 10 years now. Maybe longer.

To people who don't need to search for anything, yeah.

 

[Vengeance Villota]

4 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

To people who don't need to search for anything, yeah.

 

what do you search for where traffic is the determining factor of you or anyone going there? It's very limited.  I usually search for specific things not random things and just go to the highest traffic place.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Vengeance Villota

[Prokofy Neva]

39 minutes ago, Vengeance Villota said:

what do you search for where traffic is the determining factor of you or anyone going there? It's very limited.  I usually search for specific things not random things and just go to the highest traffic place.

So:  "traffic has been irrelevant for about 10 years now. Maybe longer."

AND

"I usually search for specific things not random things and just go to the highest traffic place."

LOL

So just excise traffic like a cancer and life will be grand, right? 

It's funny how people who advocate this would  never want to live one minute with Google like that and with their pages.

And you also want a lot that you went to and got value out of, because it was first place for a reason -- everybody went there -- to swim up to you from the depths of randomness and say: "Welcome! [uh, Clem]!"

If the Lindens made Search stop working in Firestorm -- and they may very well do that -- it will be fascinating to see if the howling will force them to reverse it; if there will be half howling they can take a gamble on and ignore, or if there will be no howling and they can just move on with whatever program they have.

Girls can just TP in from their friendship cards, right? Who needs Search?

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Solar Legion]

Wili, like it or not no matter how "logical" your arguments may seem to you ...... they are utterly irrelevant as far as I am concerned.

I have stated why this is, repeatedly now.

You're not changing my mind. You're welcome to keep "countering" what I have said but do understand that on this I am not looking for nor engaging in a debate on the matter.

Do try to accept that - contrary to your belief - not everyone finds it a useful metric.

[Vengeance Villota]

 

28 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

 

It's funny how people who advocate this would  never want to live one minute with Google like that and with their pages.

 

 

I don't expect Google-like service for 30L a week.

[Silent Mistwalker]

See, it's always the same with a certain family member. No matter what, they are never wrong. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence, it is still denied. There's only one thing left to do when it reaches this point. 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker
extra the

[Gabriele Graves]

6 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

I am saying that Legacy Search can sort by more than just Traffic. Not by much more mind but the option is there.

It would be nice if legacy search took the terms I typed in and looked for them in the parcel descriptions and returned the results ranked by most matched terms.  In addition exact matches should always appear at the top of the list before anything else.  I would use legacy search much more if it did this.  However as it is most of my use of it is when I know what I am looking for and what it is called, I just don't know where it is located.

I realise that "tag" stuffing and probably other tricks would end up gaming that as well but everything will be gamed, at least relevancy over the numbers game is a good thing to strive for in my opinion.

I don't care one bit for traffic for the obvious reasons previously stated but I almost exclusively use legacy search over web search anyway because web search is clunky.  Editing the text in the search box is slow and painful because it doesn't ever seem to work correctly and there is too much wasted space around the results.  Legacy search is terse and I like that.

[cunomar]

I was given a club to run once and asked how am i supposed to get people here when nobody stays in an empty sim and i have to leave to find people ?

5 minutes later the builder had the room filled with her own alts .

Everyone seeks a crowd but nobody wants to be the first to arrive .

[Doc Carling]

On 2/27/2021 at 6:00 PM, Finite said:

It was changed like 10 years ago which is somewhat of a shame since places with actual traffic took a hit because of places that botted traffic. I don't think bots actually count as traffic nowadays anyways. 

The value that ranks places in the search results is the same which you can find as traffic in the parcel details of the particular place. And then, if you see 50 or 60 bots more or less hidden all over that place, but no regular avatars. What do you think causes the traffic? Well, boosting traffic with bots is forbidden. But what about AFK places? A loop hole in the TOS?

Edited March 1, 2021 by Doc Carling

[Phil Deakins]

Obviously, I have to enter this thread. It's traditional 😁

I haven't even fully read the first page, but I want to post a couple of things.

Imo, traffic isn't far off being as effective now is it ever was for inworld search rankings. That's because the majority of users use 3rd party viewers, and the default search (I believe) in them is the legacy search. So I believe that most inworld searchers use the legacy search, which ranks on traffic. That's my opinion, of course.

When LL brought in the web search system - the Google Search Appliance - they incorporated traffic as a factor, but it was only a small factor. After that, they used a free, open source, search engine (Apache, I think) because they didn't have the degree of control with the GSA that they wanted. They are probably still using it. But the results it produces (the web search) are likely to only be produced for a minority of inworld searches, while the results for the majority of inworld searches are provided by the legacy search (traffic). That's still my opinion, of course.

The OP's question is "Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?" and the answer is a resounding YES for Places in the legacy search. It's not new like the OP seems to think. Bots have always changed the results in the legacy search, so that they state false popularities for places. The inworld web search isn't spoiled by traffic bots though. I suggest that the OP uses it.

LL did things to change it, like bringing in a web search, and not counting scripted agents (bots) for traffic, but they stopped short of doing the one thing that would have killed traffic bots off. If they'd stopped providing legacy search results, traffic bots would have died out at a stroke. They could still do that if they were in the slightest bit interested.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

Duplicate post - content removed.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Doc Carling]

On 2/27/2021 at 8:07 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

The cheapest and simplest option was to nuke the relevance of the traffic value. Which they did. They will not restore it's relevance because "businesses" abused that system creating artificial ways to generate traffic ... Like the one in your sig. 

No relevance? Places are ranked in the search results by the same number that's to find in the parcel details of a place under traffic. Don't take my word for it. Check it out by yourself.

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Firestorm has two, wholly different Search systems: The "modern" Web Search system and the Legacy Search system (shown as individual tabs for each main category). It is the Web Search that is - apparently - suffering.

Furthermore the Legacy system defaults to being sorted by Traffic - highest to lowest. It can also be sorted by Name/Title in Ascending or Descending order. Traffic count has long been an utterly irrelevant metric and by all rights should have been nuked from the entire system (in terms of being sortable), though such would defeat part of the purpose of having the Legacy system in the first place: Allowing users who grew used to the original system the ability to continue to use it.

It being seemingly unaffected by the latest kerfluffle is little more than a happy, circumstantial accident.

Frankly if you are paying more attention to the Traffic count given by the Search results as opposed to the Name/Title and Description ... you're doing it quite wrong. Traffic tells you nothing useful whatsoever - no, not even so called "popularity".

No. You don't know what you're talking about because you haven't consistently used the SL viewer and examined the Firestorm viewer carefully.

It's not web search that is suffering on the SL Viewer -- it's that it's crippled Legacy Search, such as it was (it removed it in 2010 or so with Viewer 2 finally) began to work wildly badly with 5000 returns instead of 50 on specific term searches and names, making it virtually impossible to find an individual person or business in many cases.

It then began breaking itself, too, as I saw anecdotally, from my own rare log-ons to Firestorm merely to snap a screenshot of the UI to help a tenant navigate it, and heard from various merchant tenants who care about how search work, and who are also savvy enough to understand that renting from me, they're not buying search, but merely a place where they can put in their own store name and key words and get the search/places ad free, which they can't do at other malls. If you want high traffic, you pay for it. Paying for it does not guarantee sales if you have not made a good product. The merchant class of SL so long ago absorbed these basic lessons of SL that the forums scripters feel they need to teach us that I don't know where to start with you all. Especially because inworld, your buildings are from 2007 and have 27 traffic on them.

On Firestorm, the old Viewer 1.23 type search available with tabs like search/places WHICH MANY, MANY PEOPLE USE AND I CONFIRM THIS DAILY WITH CUSTOMER QUERIES AND POLLS UNLIKE YOU continued to work fairly well, with occasional hiccups, for a decade.

Nerds who went to Oz's office hour lived in this illusion that "nobody" used those tabs -- how could they, it wasn't "rational" -- and that "everybody" only used Web Search.

But they didn't and in fact no one can prove their theories, including me, because we don't have the real usage statistics, the Lindens I thought had them, but when directly pressed on them, as I pressed Oz in his office hour a year ago, they obfuscate and double talk. Either they don't know or it's proprietary information.

People who use search/places aren't empty-headed big-hair blingers with big butts shopping obliviously like lemmings drawn only to big inflated traffic numbers, unable to realize that they are artificial and stacked with bots.

They aren't stupid, they understand this, and they know how to see through the falsities of SL unlike so many on the forums. They develop almost unconscious work-arounds and stratagems. And like the bien-pensant on the forums who think Traffic is a culturally repulsive phenomenon like a president's orange hair or Wal-mart shoppers, they don't take soi-disant Traffic tel quel, as it is, kak ona est'.

They just use a thing that sorts by traffic as a sorter, because it has to be sorted SOMEHOW, and sorting alphabetically isn't always useful. If you are looking for a specific thing, it has more chances of showing up on the traffic site, even if that is inflationary merely because it's big and diverse. That is, the culturally reprehensible phenomenon of "traffic" you loathe isn't what it is, but is merely the shell under which people find other things, sometimes. After all, it has to be sorted, so they sort, and look at it.

A search in web or a search in broken search/places on the SL viewer returns 5000 useless items. That is life without traffic that is so desirable to the Cognoscenti here on the forums. They don't realize how bad it will get. You don't have to be a craven bot-driven mesh body maven to realize this basic truth.

When I told a Linden to look up her name on the Broken Search and it wasn't there for 100 pages, then he got it. Another Linden just randomly could generally always find his name at the top, so he thought Search wasn't broken.

 

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Phil Deakins]

24 minutes ago, Doc Carling said:

No relevance? Places are ranked in the search results by the same number that's to find in the parcel details of a place under traffic. Don't take my word for it. Check it out by yourself.

Coffee is talking about the web search. You are talking about the legacy search. They are two different things - as different as chalk and cheese, or as coffee and tea

[Doc Carling]

4 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Coffee is talking about the web search. You are talking about the legacy search. They are two different things - as different as chalk and cheese, or as coffee and tea

Ah, thanks for the hint. My fault. Sorry. 🙂

Edited March 1, 2021 by Doc Carling

[Phil Deakins]

The OP's question dictates that the only search that ought to be discussed in this thread is the legacy search, because traffic doesn't 'fiddle' with the web search. So @Coffee Pancakeplease note

 

[Prokofy Neva]

8 hours ago, Vengeance Villota said:

 

I don't expect Google-like service for 30L a week.

Except "Google-like service" is  exactly what the Lindens bought with Google API, and exactly what they compensate for with only 30L sinks, although maybe not the classifieds, they don't tell us -- wedding them of course to that company's goals, not their own. Google API, in my view, is not the proper tool for this limited set of objects to find.

[Prokofy Neva]

55 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Obviously, I have to enter this thread. It's traditional 😁

I haven't even fully read the first page, but I want to post a couple of things.

Imo, traffic isn't far off being as effective now is it ever was for inworld search rankings. That's because the majority of users use 3rd party viewers, and the default search (I believe) in them is the legacy search. So I believe that most inworld searchers use the legacy search, which ranks on traffic. That's my opinion, of course.

When LL brought in the web search system - the Google Search Appliance - they incorporated traffic as a factor, but it was only a small factor. After that, they used a free search engine (Apache, I think) because they didn't have the degree of control with the GSA that they wanted. They are probably still using it. But the results it produces (the web search) are likely to only be produced for a minority of inworld searches, while the results for the majority of inworld searches are provided by the legacy search (traffic). That's still my opinion, of course.

The OP's question is "Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?" and the answer is a resounding YES for Places in the legacy search. It's not new like the OP seems to think. Bots have always changed the results in the legacy search, so that they state false popularities for places. The inworld web search isn't spoiled by traffic bots though. I suggest that the OP uses it.

LL did things to change it, like bringing in a web search, and not counting scripted agents (bots) for traffic, but they stopped short of doing the one thing that would have killed traffic bots off. If they'd stopped providing legacy search results, traffic bots would have died out at a stroke.

10 minutes ago, Doc Carling said:

Ah, thanks for the hint. My fault. Sorry. 🙂

Except the know-it-alls on the forums don't really know how this functions because the Lindens, like Google, do not reveal their algorithms. 

[Prokofy Neva]

5 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

It would be nice if legacy search took the terms I typed in and looked for them in the parcel descriptions and returned the results ranked by most matched terms.  In addition exact matches should always appear at the top of the list before anything else.  I would use legacy search much more if it did this.  However as it is most of my use of it is when I know what I am looking for and what it is called, I just don't know where it is located.

I realise that "tag" stuffing and probably other tricks would end up gaming that as well but everything will be gamed, at least relevancy over the numbers game is a good thing to strive for in my opinion.

I don't care one bit for traffic for the obvious reasons previously stated but I almost exclusively use legacy search over web search anyway because web search is clunky.  Editing the text in the search box is slow and painful because it doesn't ever seem to work correctly and there is too much wasted space around the results.  Legacy search is terse and I like that.

But it does do that, always did, and still does on Firestorm.

It became broken and can't do this now on the SL viewer about 3 months ago. That's what I'm talking about. That.

It works just fine with exact terms picking them out of labeled parcels in Search/Places for 30L. You know, like "Ravenglass Rentals". But it's not about me. It works for "red hot chili peppers" too.