Regarding the marketplace 'relevance' search issue

[Ashtoreth Vaniva]

Regarding the recent update to the marketplace and current status.

All merchants are suffering as a result of the recent update, sales are down to less than half for most and in some cases even more. Residents are struggling to find anything as we all know.

I hope the engineers are continuing to work on this issue and will implement a fix soon. Considering search by relevance is the default setting that makes it the most important setting.

I did put in (another) support ticket and was told that support do not get updates from the engineers on a regular basis.

However, support did say that the most common feedback and tickets they received are related to the 'relevance' search, instead of showing the higher sales items it shows anything that is relevant (old and obsolete stuff mainly). This feedback was passed to the engineers and I hope that means they are working day and night to implement a fix for this issue.

I also asked about all the 'closed tickets' that had been submitted. These tickets are not being ignored, they are being consolidated in to one internal ticket for tracking.

I fully appreciate how frustrating the situation is for all, however I do feel they will fix this issue as soon as possible, Linden are also losing money and I feel sure that it is impacting them greatly too.

However I do note the most residents are running low on patience at this point and merchants can not sustain these kind of losses for long.

There are also regular meetings that any resident can go to if they wish to discuss such issues:

Linden Lab Official:User Groups - Second Life Wiki

Maybe a good idea for a few of us to try to attend the next meeting for clarification and updates.

Hang in there, I am sure it will be sorted!

Ash.

Edited March 24, 2023 by Ashtoreth Vaniva

[Ceka Cianci]

Shouldn't higher sales show stronger under the Best Selling search option rather than showing stronger under the Relevance search option? Especially since we still have a limit on how many pages we get on our searches.

My biggest problem with search is  how many of our limited pages get eaten up by fewer stores than we should be getting because the main searches getting flooded with adds for different versions of the same thing..

I seen one store taking up 30 pages or more of single gesture adds, which felt more like trolling the marketplace than anything.. That's the kind thing I really hope they are working on fixing. The sad thing was, it wasn't even a search for gestures.. hehehe

There should be one add in the main search for an item that leads to a store, where there we can see all the single adds for something, rather than flooding the main search with each single add.. like one top that leads to a store where they can show the 20 different colors, rather than 20 different colors of the same thing eating up the limited pages we have.

That keeps us from finding other creators. I hope when it's all said and done they either open our page limit back up all the way or do something with improving what creators can do in their stores, but open up the main searches to where we can actually get to more creators.

They won't fix the MP by limiting our pages, without fixing the flooding, unless they found a way to put 5 gallons of stuff in a one gallon bucket.. hehehe.

 

[Alwin Alcott]

i'd like to see repaired that the store name is relevant. It's not very constructive, or in other words used for the declining usebase ... retaining mp clients,  to look through hundred pages for the item you really want.

[Ashtoreth Vaniva]

Hi Ceka, 

As far as I’m aware the page limit (which was 50) has been removed and you should now be seeing all the pages. 
The relevance search for years automatically showed the best selling items and it’s the search that by default residents use. Nobody wants to see items from 10 years ago and it’s the main reason merchants sales are now considerably lower. I believe the engineers will fix this. 
If you’re not seeing all the pages maybe drop support a message? 
I’m not sure how they would implement the changes you speak of as once a merchant lists an item it automatically joins the main pages, I think that would be a tall order, or even impossible. 
There is a Jira page though where you can open a ticket with these kind of suggestions. 
Best wishes, 

Ash. 

[Ashtoreth Vaniva]

Hi Alwin, 

As far as I’m aware the reason behind this was searches were showing merchants rather than showing items. For example if you searched for ‘apple’, you’d also get results for any merchant who has the word ‘apple’ in their store name which is not relevant to the search. 
Residents can search for merchants using the merchants/store tab at the top of the marketplace so I can understand this change but I’m sure plenty will slate me for saying that! 
Best wishes, 

Ash. 

[Rowan Amore]

37 minutes ago, Ashtoreth Vaniva said:

The relevance search for years automatically showed the best selling items

That's only a part of how relevancy is determined.  I've always changed to Newest first when searching for a particular item.  Sometimes, Best Selling.  Never relevancy.

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/470367-how-marketplace-items-get-on-top-of-relevance/#:~:text=Relevance is a matrix of bits and parts,be shown in specific Searches on the Marketplace.

[Ashtoreth Vaniva]

Hi Rowan, 

I think people are generally turning to that way now for searches but from what they are telling me they still expect the 'relevancy' search to behave in the same way that it has for all these years, and not to show outdated items that nobody wants to see. 

Though I guess eventually people will adapt their searches, but in general we still hope Linden will revert this search back to the old way. New residents for sure would not know how to search differently other than using the standard relevance search supplied as default. 

Best wishes, 

Ash. 

[Rowan Amore]

8 minutes ago, Ashtoreth Vaniva said:

Hi Rowan, 

I think people are generally turning to that way now for searches but from what they are telling me they still expect the 'relevancy' search to behave in the same way that it has for all these years, and not to show outdated items that nobody wants to see. 

Though I guess eventually people will adapt their searches, but in general we still hope Linden will revert this search back to the old way. New residents for sure would not know how to search differently other than using the standard relevance search supplied as default. 

Best wishes, 

Ash. 

The thing is, relevancy was the one matrix that could be gamed easily.  IMO, the easiest thing to do is set default search to newest or best selling.

[Ceka Cianci]

2 hours ago, Ashtoreth Vaniva said:

Hi Ceka, 

As far as I’m aware the page limit (which was 50) has been removed and you should now be seeing all the pages. 
The relevance search for years automatically showed the best selling items and it’s the search that by default residents use. Nobody wants to see items from 10 years ago and it’s the main reason merchants sales are now considerably lower. I believe the engineers will fix this. 
If you’re not seeing all the pages maybe drop support a message? 
I’m not sure how they would implement the changes you speak of as once a merchant lists an item it automatically joins the main pages, I think that would be a tall order, or even impossible. 
There is a Jira page though where you can open a ticket with these kind of suggestions. 
Best wishes, 

Ash. 

When the MP first came around the search would give you the results of your search..Then one day, maybe last year or the year before, it was lowered to 150 pages, then recently lowered to 50 and then put to 104 pages that we have now..

As far as relevance, that is where my search term should thrive over anything.. If I look for a certain item like, (This is just an example search and not a real one) Mesh hair, Some flexi hair from years ago shouldn't be showing upfront because it is best selling because it had hair in the name.. That should be happening in best selling search but does happen in relevance and has for years.. Relevance should be by the whole search term first  and then the pecking order after.. Hopefully that is what we will end up with when they are finished otherwise we are wading through things still..

The adjustments to my search term should happen in the search options available when I add them..

As far as the linking of items, ya it's probably too late for that to be fixed and would probably break all kinds of stuff like Redelivery and things like that..But they could have made it where you had to link the items from the store rather than auto link them.. If there was a way that they could do that and made it where stores did have to relink without breaking a bunch of stuff, I bet a lot of older content would get cleaned off that's just been sitting there on accounts that have just left things up there to sit..

I know they probably can't but it's a big reason in my eyes why we shouldn't be limited on our pages.. I'd much rather have more results than speedy less results.. hehehe

 

 

Edited March 24, 2023 by Ceka Cianci
typo

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Ashtoreth Vaniva said:

Hi Alwin, 

As far as I’m aware the reason behind this was searches were showing merchants rather than showing items.

seeing the 98% of items with keyword spam, the system will stay a pool of garbage. But as we all know that never had ány interest by anyone in  LL.

[Ceka Cianci]

1 hour ago, Ashtoreth Vaniva said:

Hi Alwin, 

As far as I’m aware the reason behind this was searches were showing merchants rather than showing items. For example if you searched for ‘apple’, you’d also get results for any merchant who has the word ‘apple’ in their store name which is not relevant to the search. 
Residents can search for merchants using the merchants/store tab at the top of the marketplace so I can understand this change but I’m sure plenty will slate me for saying that! 
Best wishes, 

Ash. 

This is one of the things that bothered me as well, is mixing things in a search that don't belong..do a search for something like Apples and get mary applegates store of single items in every color of every item in their whole 10 pages of products..LOL

That's 10 pages of my search eaten up.. hehehe

That's also a made up name and search term, but just an example..

[Love Zhaoying]

Perhaps if the search methodology was to first search for everything BUT Keywords, then search Keywords - will yield a better result?

[Aethelwine]

I disagree with some of the comments about only wanting to see new things come up in the relevance search. A teleport pad from 10 years ago is just as relevant to me as one made last week.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, Ashtoreth Vaniva said:

Regarding the recent update to the marketplace and current status.

All merchants are suffering as a result of the recent update, sales are down to less than half for most and in some cases even more. Residents are struggling to find anything as we all know.

Interesting. I'd love to hear what sort of research you've done to come to those conclusions.

[Ceka Cianci]

4 minutes ago, Aethelwine said:

I disagree with some of the comments about only wanting to see new things come up in the relevance search. A teleport pad from 10 years ago is just as relevant to me as one made last week.

I agree, I'm always looking for older content.. There is a lot of really creative older good things that you just don't see made anymore or that much.. Relevance should be relevant to our search term over everything else..

 

[Ashtoreth Vaniva]

Hi Theresa, 

I'm going on the huge amount of Jira tickets submitted over the last 4 weeks, comments in the forums, feedback from customers. If you've not searched Jira maybe take a look. 

This has been going on for weeks and there are lots of unhappy people. If you look on Jira you will see the amount of merchants there saying the same thing. But its not just merchants, buyers are facing issues when making a simple search. Plenty of forum posts about this on here

Best wishes, 

Ash. 

Edited March 24, 2023 by Ashtoreth Vaniva

[Rowan Amore]

34 minutes ago, Aethelwine said:

I disagree with some of the comments about only wanting to see new things come up in the relevance search. A teleport pad from 10 years ago is just as relevant to me as one made last week.

Best selling would be another option then as an older item that's been purchased 1000s of more times than a newer item would show up first.  The problem with relevancy is merchants DO spam keyword so you do end up with irrelevant items.  This has been an issue with the MP for years and why I never have used it as my first search option.

I've searched for a few items in recent weeks and using my way, haven't had any issue finding what I want.

[Ashtoreth Vaniva]

One final post from me, the reason I opened this was to offer those who have submitted the Jira tickets, support tickets or posted in the forums here about the current state of the relevance search some further insight. I received this information yesterday so wanted to share. I know we all have differing opinions and I'm not here to debate that. Simply to pass on the information I was given by support yesterday. 

Best wishes, 

Ash. 

 

[Rowan Amore]

11 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

Relevance should be relevant to our search term over everything else..

For me, this has never been the case.  Example...some merchants use Dress in every single MP listing therefore showing me every single item in their store regardless of whether it's a dress or not.

[Ceka Cianci]

3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

For me, this has never been the case.  Example...some merchants use Dress in every single MP listing therefore showing me every single item in their store regardless of whether it's a dress or not.

They really need to let us flag gaming things like that..That's one of the reason the main search gets clogged up.

[Love Zhaoying]

Is Borg search! Resistance is irrelevant.

 

[Ceka Cianci]

I just did a search term for mesh head and actually got mesh heads showing up right away, which  didn't used to happen..

What would happen before is, I would get all kinds of content for mesh heads like, shapes and skins and things and finally just end up going to the left side menu to get to them finally..

Shouldn't that be how it's supposed to work?

 

ETA: Nevermind.. It goes back to what it was the moment you put in a brand name.. hehehe

 

Edited March 24, 2023 by Ceka Cianci

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I just did a search term for mesh head and actually got mesh heads showing up right away, which  didn't used to happen..

What would happen before is, I would get all kinds of content for mesh heads like, shapes and skins and things and finally just end up going to the left side menu to get to them finally..

Shouldn't that be how it's supposed to work?

 

ETA: Nevermind.. It goes back to what it was the moment you put in a brand name.. hehehe

 

What if you drill down to "avatar components" after the initial search, does that help restore relevance?

[Ceka Cianci]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

What if you drill down to "avatar components" after the initial search, does that help restore relevance?

From there, I have to then go into Avatar skin and shape combinations for them to show up right away.

That's pretty much how it used to be as well..

Edited March 24, 2023 by Ceka Cianci

[Marianne Little]

I wrote in another thread that many people only use default search. Saying that they can change search to this or that is not good, when a few don't even know about or use the forums.

Short said, if somebody's been told Trompe Loeil have good houses, and they type in that without changing anything...