The new marketplace search

[AmyDire]

A huge thanks to Linden for fixing the marketplace! 

Edited August 18, 2023 by AmyDire

[Pit Banx]

Yes, thank you....didn't take long either😂

[QuestionMarkk]

How exactly is it fixed?

Relevance pages are still a complete MESS. The oldest items come as first. Stuff that nobody bought since ages. How is that suppose to help the sales? 

They should at least sent the Best Selling page as the default when you one opens someone's Marketplace store.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Seems to work a lot better now than it used to if you're using long keyword searches. Results were really bad before, like showing sculpties, gacha, and stuff. If they did really fix it, it's going to take at least two weeks before sales information updates and the data SLMP is using to sort and search (like sales data) catches up.

The problem was very likely that SLMP was pushing older and outdated products in search, so more people were buying them, thus boosting their sales rankings over newer and higher quality builds. People are going to buy low quality stuff if it's all they can find. As the good stuff becomes easier to find, it's going to slowly work its way up.

But you have to imagine, sales and all sorts of other factors LL uses to rank products in search has like a year of having low quality search results pushing low quality products. Meaning even if they fix search, it's going to be a while until customers correct it and give SLMP good data to sort, search, and filter with. Basically, the bad search results affects that data SLMP uses to sort and search which then causes more bad search results. It's an endless feedback loop that just makes search worse and worse. But if they did really fix it (which I think they've improved it), it's going to take some time and sales good products for their fixes to show up.

No matter what LL does there's going to be some irrelevant results because of merchants abusing keywords. Best thing you can do is vote with your L$ for relevant results because AFAIK LL weighs search results based on sales, to some degree. I've been watching a few search terms for the last few months just to see the quality of what's returned. And it has gotten better, slowly. Searching for "blue shirt" used to return a lot of old style clothing items (you know, the ones that now work with BOM) and no mesh. Now it's mesh results. Some are not blue, some are not shirts, but you are at least getting things that are blue and things that are shirts and the first page of results is actually pretty decent looking stuff that's somewhat modern, showing 96 results per page.

So by what I've been watching, search is a lot better than it has been. It was atrocious before. I gave up trying to buy things because it was futile. I felt it strongly in my sales. But things seems to be trending well. Search will not be fixed overnight, but as long as it's trending in the right direction it's a very good sign.

[Flaire Xevion]

The fix did nothing for larger stores. The best selling list is a mess on that too. And relevance also. 

[Flea Yatsenko]

Best selling is going to be a mess for a while even if they fixed the code. Because the code doesn't have proper sales data to give good results. The larger the store, the worse it's going to be and the longer it's going to take to fix. And best selling works by number of transactions, not L$ earned or anything. Mine are a little funky right now too because some of the old cheap stuff was selling better. But the last week or so my newer stuff has been selling a lot more. But it'll take time for the sales data SLMP uses to calculate best selling to be updated and reflect the changes they made.

Right now, only really immediate effects we're going to see are the results not showing horribly outdated products. After customers keep buying the newer stuff, it'll start to show in best selling results. But it's going to take time, and LL to not break anything before the sales data improves.

[QuestionMarkk]

Yes, I know, but when i look at most stores Best Selling pages still look way batter than Relevance.

At least half of the Relevance page is usually still full of old items, while Best Selling is not. Just my observations.

[Flaire Xevion]

Sales are rolled back to March. And they are not updating.