Linden Lab please stop experimenting with Search/Relevance on Marketplace

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Somewhere at the beginning of this year, LL decided to 'improve' the Relevance-based search algorithm on MP. This was, in my opinion, a total failure.

About two months ago, they seem to have decided to roll it back to its old form.

As of yesterday, September 16, 2023, they seem to have re-introduced it. Same, in my opinion, dysfuntional upgrade. Same utterly irrelevant* search results.

What the hell, Linden Lab?

Do you think no one notices? Surely even you must see a substantial decline in your 10% commission revenue as a direct result of your experiments?

-------

* Mostly very old items that are in many cases only marginally related to the search keywords

Edited September 17, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Sid Nagy]

3 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

What the hell, Linden Lab?

Do you think no one notices? Surely even you must see a substantial decline in your 10% commission revenue as a direct result of your experiments?

 

There is always stuff showing up and people will spend their L$ somewhere in the end and will return for more, so there is no sweat for LL at all.
So there is only annoyance with search savvy customers and ditto merchants in optimizing keywords.

Once the Lindens decide something on their Olympus ......... the residents can only suffer and complain at their Wailing wall (called Jira), where someone routinely closes tickets that are inconvenient. C'mon Arduenn, you are long enough with the circus to know how the act works.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

9 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

There is always stuff showing up and people will spend their L$ somewhere in the end and will return for more

I'm pretty sure that many, after two or three pages of utter irrelevant search results, customers will simply give up. Sure, the L$ will end up being spent on something else all together, most likely in-world, where LL does not receive their 10% commission.

[Sid Nagy]

22 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

I'm pretty sure that many, after two or three pages of utter irrelevant search results, customers will simply give up. Sure, the L$ will end up being spent on something else all together, most likely in-world, where LL does not receive their 10% commission.

They make their money in USD not in L$. They print the L$ themselves if needed remember?
So the only commissions that make money for The Lab \ Tilia are the commissions on the money market.
Marketplace commissions are only a L$ sink to stimulate L$ demand.

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

45 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Sure, the L$ will end up being spent on something else all together, most likely in-world, where LL does not receive their 10% commission.

They make their money in USD not in L$. They print the L$ themselves if needed remember?
So the only commissions that make money for The Lab \ Tilia are the commissions on the money market.
Marketplace commissions are only a L$ sink to stimulate L$ demand.

To be fair, the 10% fee (and other sinks) do indirectly make money for LL because they do accelerate the need for people to buy more lindens.

Many merchants don't ever cash out and just continue to spend their income within SL. If everybody did that on MP, eventually we'd run out of lindens and someone has to buy more. If everybody did that in-world, we could keep circulating the money forever.

Edited September 17, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Love Zhaoying]

If by "experimenting", you mean "trying to fix"..sure! They can just leave it broken.

[Sid Nagy]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

To be fair, the 10% fee (and other sinks) do indirectly make money for LL because they do accelerate the need for people to buy more lindens.

Many merchants don't ever cash out and just continue to spend their income within SL. If everybody did that on MP, eventually we'd run out of lindens and someone has to buy more. If everybody did that in-world, we could keep circulating the money forever.

It is a needed L$ sink already, I think mainly about the stipends LL pumps into SL every week. The upload fees and the MP sink make that it doesn't influence the money flows at the exchange too much.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

34 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

It is a needed L$ sink already, I think mainly about the stipends LL pumps into SL every week. The upload fees and the MP sink make that it doesn't influence the money flows at the exchange too much.

We can just agree to disagree on the effect of those sinks then, since neither of us can really prove anything one way or another. 😋

Almost all stipends are backed by a cash payment though, so it's not like LL is giving out free money or losing money from missed linden purchases.

I'll let it go though, not really relevant to OP.

Edited September 17, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Flea Yatsenko]

SLMP search will never be good. There's too much legacy content and all the content is organized in archaic ways, like categories and keywords. There are too many items and not enough computational resources to accurately use sales data, especially for products more niche than mainstream clothing and home related stuff. Last I heard only the top 50k selling items on SLMP have their sales data weighted in results. When you consider there are people here who have 10k+ items in their gacha store, you realize how small and futile that number is. I don't even know what kind of sales data SLMP tracks.

But if it's anything like what we see in the merchant dashboard, it's just lifetime product sales. Which is completely useless data for old stores, because people will buy old stuff and older products which are worse will have to be dethroned by newer products. I.E. 10 years of a product making L$10,000 a year needs a new product to make L$100,000 in the first year to beat it in the sales data SLMP dashboard has. If that's all they're using for sales data, they are in trouble.

You know the old phrase, "garbage in, garbage out"? That's what SLMP's product database is right now. Poorly organized and labelled products missing important data for sorting and organizing. The expectation that it'll be fixed and anywhere remotely close to Google product search or Amazon can be dropped forever.

SLMP has rewarded poor listing practices for a very long time. I.E. if you spam keywords, make 10 different listings for 10 different color variants, edit your pictures and make them deceiving, etc., you will make more L$ and still rank high. Now the SLMP database is filled with inaccurate and low quality listings that SLMP team has to try and make sense of and deliver to potential customers.

No amount of tweaking or adjusting things is going to make things better. SLMP search needs a radical change and it needs to accept that there's a lot of low quality listings and outdated content that needs to be removed from default search results unless a searcher actively makes a selection to show those types of products.

SEO for web pages is an ongoing battle that web sites constantly have to fight to keep up with. SLMP has none of that, a listing that's 10 years old for a prim build has as much relevancy and power as one that's 3 days old (at least looking at the current state of search). I'm not even happy with the results SLMP gives when searching just my store.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

13 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

SLMP search will never be good.

Yes, but it just got infinitely worse for no reason.

I'm not even angry that my own products end up lower (basically out of sight all together, but whatever). It's just infuriating that the top search results are beyond ridiculous. A random grab from the database would come up with more relevant results. I wish I was joking with that statement, but it almost seems deliberate. I can't go into specific details because of the forum ToS, but just to give a few vague examples:

Search for 'game'.

1. First result: I don't even know what the hell this product is supposed to be. No picture, no sensible description. It has nothing to do with games. And it comes up at #1 in Relevance.
2. Second result: a Squid Game mask that screams copyright infringement.
3. Third result: a 3D model of a gaming console that does absolutely nothing. The object description is pure sarcasm (which, in its own right, I can appreciate): "The sleek design of this game console [it's a black plastic box, ffs] will fill your Second Life with endless hours of fun and joy. Invite your friends over to gaze at the wonder. Take pictures and show your family. Fill your social media feed with image after image of this amazing piece of modern art."

Search was fine. it was not perfect. But now it's not even broken anymore. It's anti-search.

 

Edited September 18, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Ardy Lay]

I don't know if this is helpful at all in determining what is happening, but try searching for: play the game

Is this what is called a clue?