The marketplace has been rigged!!!

[Extrude Ragu]

Can't help but notice OP has a store with this category of products and most MP reviews seem to be uh.... mixed. to put it kindly.

I'm not denying that recent MP changes could play a part, but judging from their review feedback, could it be possible the reason that OP doesn't find their products there anymore be because they are not as well received by customers as products with similar tags?

 

[Pixie Kobichenko]

On 2/5/2024 at 4:57 PM, jrenslow Bach said:

Sellers have rigged the search results in the marketplace by flooding it with useless stuff and having their games show up at the top of search for instance search billiards and you will see what I mean

I searched “billiards” & sorted by best selling & your $1L table was the 2nd listing, however it had the lowest rating on the first page of 96 results.  
I sorted by oldest, and your 73 prim $L899 table with the oldest review from 2010 is the 7th result w/ not great ratings. 

So for me, if I was in the market for a table I would search this way & not be inclined to purchase either due to age of product, ratings & high prim count.  Prims-land impact is a precious finite commodity there’s been a loooot of improvements & strides made for creators to produce desirable merchandise & primmy items that are going on 15 years old aren’t in demand.

Maybe you might take the previous reviews as constructive criticism & address issues previously raised in rating comments ie the inability to rotate a table because the racked balls can only face one direction. Work on an improved product & offer it to one or two previous reviewers upon releas3 & see what they think.

[Clem Marques]

On 2/5/2024 at 11:57 PM, jrenslow Bach said:

Sellers have rigged the search results in the marketplace by flooding it with useless stuff and having their games show up at the top of search for instance search billiards and you will see what I mean

I understand that there are factors that impact the amount of purchases in this specific case, when it comes to the age of the billiards game and its ratings, as others have pointed out:

On 2/6/2024 at 12:33 AM, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So, you're complaining that there are newer pool tables on the market than your 73 LI prim based one in a newest first sort?

19 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

You mean like the second one under the "Best Selling" sort for "Billiards," which is getting ripped to pieces in the reviews?

Customers might look at the item's age, prim count, and negative reviews and make the decision to stay away from it. Rightfully so. However there's still an important discussion to be had here, regardless of the billiards game's issue.

Is the Marketplace rigged? No, but it is flawed in its current state, and people are exploiting it to gain an unfair advantage over other creators. Which in turn makes the Marketplace search results potentially unfair due to the immoral actions of certain stores and LL's flawed algorithm that allows this to happen. The video that @AmeliaJ08 linked to earlier in this thread is fantastic and a good summary of what is going on at the moment.

What are some of the issues?

• Keyword spam, which results in irrelevant items being shown in search results, making the shopping experience a waste of time. Having to sift through the irrelevant listings to find what you were looking for.
• Really old, outdated items showing up before modern ones. This issue seems to be improving lately, but it still happens occasionally. Search for "Hair" and you will see what I mean.
• Fake reviews. By fake reviews I mean sellers using alts to give their products fraudulent 5 star reviews (which is against TOS), or asking their friends to do it for them (which is also immoral and should not be allowed.) I have come across two examples of it: One was a script creator that created two new products, and within less than 30 minutes they both had several 5 star reviews, which is so unlikely it might as well be impossible. The other culprit is a severely overpriced HUD that has three pages of 5 star reviews, all created within the span of 2 days. Very shady.

            For the most part, I think LL is doing a good job at managing fake positive reviews, as I don't see them that often. But it's still something to consider.

            However, when I came across them, I could not find a way to report them. Is there any way to do that? I'd love to know.

            When it comes to fake/unfair negative reviews from competitors or disgruntled customers, my experience regarding those has been fantastic. LL quickly spotted the issue and dealt with the harasser's review, which complained about things that were very clearly explained within the product's listing.

• The flawed search algorithm that is currently being exploited (allegedly.) How are people doing that? I will explain below:

1. Short titles seem to be heavily favored by the algorithm, anything beyond one or two words gets tossed to the end of the search results when sorted by "Relevance" (which is the Marketplace's default type of search.) This did not use to be the case. In the past, when you searched for a product you would often get items from popular, high-quality creators suggested. Nowadays you just get random listings that show up as relevant due to a short title.
2. The worst part: Spam in the "Features" section of the listing somehow helping these items show up above all others in the search results.

Example: 

                       

These are traits shared by all of the current top search results when you look for generic items such as "table"  "plant" "sofa"  etc. Which points at something being wrong here.

What could be done about this?

• The algorithm should to be fixed so that it cannot be exploited in the way it currently seems to be.
• List feature spam as a disallowed Marketplace listing practice just like keyword spam is not allowed
• Allow customers to report shady, potentially fake 5 star reviews the same way they are able to report fake low ratings (That might already be possible, but I haven't been able to find it)
• Idea: Change the default search type to "Newest first" instead of "Relevance". It's definitely not ideal, but would at least curb the issue of being faced with extremely old items when looking for modern, low prim ones.

       Regardless of what is done, the consensus seems to be that something should be done. These changes in the Marketplace's algorithm have deeply affected lots of sellers negatively, and it has also negatively impacted the experience that new SL users have when exploring the Marketplace. How are they supposed to know how wonderful the creators in SL are if when they search, most of what they see are severely outdated items?

Should sellers that are currently exploiting the algorithm be punished?

My opinion is that no, they shouldn't be punished for it. If they have been able to game the system, it's because the system itself is flawed. There is nothing in the TOS currently prohibiting Features spam and many people are choosing to do it, even though it can be considered immoral and should not be supported.

However, should the rules about listings change, I believe the offending listings should be deactivated so that the sellers can fix the issues and be in compliance with the rules, then reactivate the improved, honest listings.

That being said...

...I love the Marketplace, and think it's a fantastic tool for creators and shoppers alike. It just needs some TLC to make it perfect and to improve the experience for all its users. It might take time for it to happen, but it's important, and I'm sure many of us would be very grateful if these issues were dealt with.  

Edited February 7 by Clem Marques

[Carolyn Zapedzki]

I have never had any trouble finding what I need, and people don't seem to have trouble finding my stuff either.

I find inworld search worse when people use keywords and they don't have that item after searching their shop for ages wasting peoples time.

[Love Zhaoying]

8 hours ago, Pixie Kobichenko said:

I searched “billiards” & sorted by best selling & your $1L table was the 2nd listing, however it had the lowest rating on the first page of 96 results.  
I sorted by oldest, and your 73 prim $L899 table with the oldest review from 2010 is the 7th result w/ not great ratings. 

My takeaway from this is, you easily found the OP's listings simply sorting by "best listing", and one of the OP's listings was very high in the search results.

Given this, I don't see a real issue with a "flood" of other listings preventing users from finding the OP's products in the MP.

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

The MP is so outdated in how it works in so many  areas, both back end and front end, that I don't envy LL the act of even prioritizing the changes that need doing.

Beyond the dated usability, even fixing something as standard/basic in online stores as putting all the colour variations of an item into just a single listing with a pull down UI control to select a colour is a massive needed change.

On the store yesterday, a simple search under apparel for LaraX arranged by most recent has more than half the visible listings being a single top in 16 colours, with the associated jeans—also in a massive range of slightly different denim colours—taking up most of the rest of the page 1 search results.

Those should be two listings. A top and the jeans. Not cluttering up the UI by taking up 32+ spots.

Edited February 7 by Katherine Heartsong

[Theresa Tennyson]

56 minutes ago, Carolyn Zapedzki said:

I have never had any trouble finding what I need, and people don't seem to have trouble finding my stuff either.

I find inworld search worse when people use keywords and they don't have that item after searching their shop for ages wasting peoples time.

There's a fundamental difference between a customer looking for an item and a merchant looking for their own items and/or trying to prove the proposition, "Search is terribell! Moomph!"

A customer is probably looking for something specific which means their query will probably be filtered down more to begin with, by words and/or categories. I doubt a customer is just going to go, "Show me All The Plants (growy, factory, whatever)" and when I do using the "relevance" setting it shows me plants that look pretty good, actually.

Edited February 7 by Theresa Tennyson

[Sid Nagy]

There are so many items on the marketplace that no one can't expect to be on the first pages with general search words like table, jeans, suit or plants.
People should be Internet savvy enough by now to know the google basics to find stuff. All (merchants and customers) should know that keyword combinations are more important than single keywords to get results.

 

Edited February 7 by Sid Nagy

[Carolyn Zapedzki]

55 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

There's a fundamental difference between a customer looking for an item and a merchant looking for their own items and/or trying to prove the proposition, "Search is terribell! Moomph!"

A customer is probably looking for something specific which means their query will probably be filtered down more to begin with, by words and/or categories. I doubt a customer is just going to go, "Show me All The Plants (growy, factory, whatever)" and when I do using the "relevance" setting it shows me plants that look pretty good, actually.

"There's a fundamental difference between a customer looking for an item and a merchant looking for their own items and/or trying to prove the proposition,"

Yes, I know that. I am talking as a customer and a seller. I have never had a problem. Obviously, others have but I am just stating my own experience which is also relevant!

[Flea Yatsenko]

15 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Can't help but notice OP has a store with this category of products and most MP reviews seem to be uh.... mixed. to put it kindly.

I'm not denying that recent MP changes could play a part, but judging from their review feedback, could it be possible the reason that OP doesn't find their products there anymore be because they are not as well received by customers as products with similar tags?

 

SLMP supposedly only takes into account sales (and probably reviews) of the top 50,000 selling products. That might sound like a lot but when you consider how many popular clothing items there are in 10 different colors it's not really a lot. You can estimate how many products on are SLMP by sorting by newest and looking at the product ID, since it's an integer that incriments by one for each new listing. Highest ID right now is 25,705,760. So almost 26 million possible listings (it's probably a bit lower than this in practice) and only 50k have their sales (and probably reviews) influencing their ranking when searching by relevancy. Even if it's a quarter of the 25 million, that still leaves 50k as a tiny percentage.

Some of the keywords I target with my store have some 1 star low quality products way ahead of mine, followed by my own products that I'd rather see ranked lower since they are older, with my newer stuff buried pages back.

Once you are out of the top 50k, which is pretty easy to do if you're not selling mainstream products (like clothing), it only seems to care about keywords. And it's pretty easy to game, honestly. As @Clem Marques noted so well, you can just spam the keyword you're targeting and leave out anything else and you'll rank higher. And if you're out of the top 50k best selling, it's extremely effective.

It actively inhibits writing detailed, in depth descriptions. In inhibits coming up with clever product names. The only thing the new search has done is cut down on people spamming irrelevant keywords. But it's gone so far in the opposite direction that it's not helpful. Any sort of wordy, clever name and description gets buried by "plants plants plants plants plants" features: "Plants plants plants plants plants"

I really don't like to say mean things about other products but some of the keywords I'm targeting have someone who just used blender ANT Landscape plugin and put a texture on it, and a very early mesh product with a single tiled texture with physics that don't really work (according to reviews).

Once you are out of the top 50k of sales you are in a real wild west of search not working well.

EDIT: And I'm pretty sure, given the sales data you can get as a merchant, sales data only includes lifetime sales and total transactions, so it favors older products, when calculating rankings. Which probably explains why some very old things are ranking so high when searching by relevancy.

Edited February 7 by Flea Yatsenko

[Paul Hexem]

On 2/6/2024 at 11:03 AM, Love Zhaoying said:

"does something about it"!

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

But..but..COMPLAINING is "doing something"!!

[Rowan Amore]

8 hours ago, Clem Marques said:

Idea: Change the default search type to "Newest first" instead of "Relevance". It's definitely not ideal, but would at least curb the issue of being faced with extremely old items when looking for modern, low prim ones.

I've mentioned this numerous times when merchants where complaining that their items weren't showing up as before.  If I'm searching Plant and that's all, I'd choose Newest first.   If I want a more refined search, I then whittle it down if it's Landscaping or Decor, etc.   Relevancy includes too many parameters to be of ANY use to me.

There have also been long time residents who were unaware of that option or the option to no show limited quantities/demos.   Not sure how LL can help if people refuse to pay attention. 

[Katherine Heartsong]

3 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

SLMP supposedly only takes into account sales (and probably reviews) of the top 50,000 selling products. That might sound like a lot but when you consider how many popular clothing items there are in 10 different colors it's not really a lot. You can estimate how many products on are SLMP by sorting by newest and looking at the product ID, since it's an integer that incriments by one for each new listing. Highest ID right now is 25,705,760. So almost 26 million possible listings (it's probably a bit lower than this in practice) and only 50k have their sales (and probably reviews) influencing their ranking when searching by relevancy. Even if it's a quarter of the 25 million, that still leaves 50k as a tiny percentage.

Some of the keywords I target with my store have some 1 star low quality products way ahead of mine, followed by my own products that I'd rather see ranked lower since they are older, with my newer stuff buried pages back.

Once you are out of the top 50k, which is pretty easy to do if you're not selling mainstream products (like clothing), it only seems to care about keywords. And it's pretty easy to game, honestly. As @Clem Marques noted so well, you can just spam the keyword you're targeting and leave out anything else and you'll rank higher. And if you're out of the top 50k best selling, it's extremely effective.

It actively inhibits writing detailed, in depth descriptions. In inhibits coming up with clever product names. The only thing the new search has done is cut down on people spamming irrelevant keywords. But it's gone so far in the opposite direction that it's not helpful. Any sort of wordy, clever name and description gets buried by "plants plants plants plants plants" features: "Plants plants plants plants plants"

I really don't like to say mean things about other products but some of the keywords I'm targeting have someone who just used blender ANT Landscape plugin and put a texture on it, and a very early mesh product with a single tiled texture with physics that don't really work (according to reviews).

Once you are out of the top 50k of sales you are in a real wild west of search not working well.

EDIT: And I'm pretty sure, given the sales data you can get as a merchant, sales data only includes lifetime sales and total transactions, so it favors older products, when calculating rankings. Which probably explains why some very old things are ranking so high when searching by relevancy.

I know you can sort by "Newest First" but we need a filter mechanism in the UI to limit the years. I'd design a UI element (per category?) that let's me specify I don't want to see any clothing/hair/furniture/etc made prior to 2018, for example. A 15 year old blouse in the five standard sizes is nothing I really want to see.

[Flea Yatsenko]

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

I've mentioned this numerous times when merchants where complaining that their items weren't showing up as before.  If I'm searching Plant and that's all, I'd choose Newest first.   If I want a more refined search, I then whittle it down if it's Landscaping or Decor, etc.   Relevancy includes too many parameters to be of ANY use to me.

There have also been long time residents who were unaware of that option or the option to no show limited quantities/demos.   Not sure how LL can help if people refuse to pay attention. 

That's the right thing to do, but it's unreasonable to expect the average user to do that. If you search Google, Amazon, or eBay it gives you the shiniest, newest, high quality listings right away without having to do anything else. I'd even argue there's a large amount of users who don't even search websites very often, since they've become accustomed to algorithms showing them everything they need without having to search.

I've always been a fan of SL sending an email and notice that in 3 months, your store will be set to legacy status if you don't click a button or something. It would weed out all the stores that don't have active owners. Search would change to not showing active merchants by default, and having a filter that allows you to include the "legacy" results from inactive merchants. It would probably get some inactive users to become active too.

 

[Sid Nagy]

2 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

I've mentioned this numerous times when merchants where complaining that their items weren't showing up as before.  If I'm searching Plant and that's all, I'd choose Newest first.   If I want a more refined search, I then whittle it down if it's Landscaping or Decor, etc.   Relevancy includes too many parameters to be of ANY use to me.

There have also been long time residents who were unaware of that option or the option to no show limited quantities/demos.   Not sure how LL can help if people refuse to pay attention. 

The search string "The plant that I'm looking for"  should lead to the right plants on the first page.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

10 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

The search string "The plant that I'm looking for"  should lead to the right plants on the first page.

 

I assume, that I search for "Robert Plant", it will search for all Roberts, all Plants, etc.

The user would need to search for "Robert AND Plant", right?

[Sid Nagy]

32 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I assume, that I search for "Robert Plant", it will search for all Roberts, all Plants, etc.

The user would need to search for "Robert AND Plant", right?

No.
"Belli shop"* is sufficient.
AND is optional.....

* No need to test, it gives no result.

 

Edited February 7 by Sid Nagy

[steeljane42]

12 hours ago, Clem Marques said:

The flawed search algorithm that is currently being exploited (allegedly.) How are people doing that? I will explain below:

And what's worse it also has a snowball effect. Because it's being exploited by, let's call them "shady creators", that tend to flood MP with their garbage which is often are just stolen/bought 3D models from the usual few 3D models sites, or it's those FP resellers that tend to list hundreds items at once every few days, it starts to affect legitimate creators sales.

I barely use/buy anything on MP for many years, but still check it now and then. And recently I've seen a few creators that I consider good changing their MP listings to fit the new favored algorithms where listings and descripting got rid of actual product names and all named something like "maitreya legacy reborn lingerie" for example about one creator that makes one release a month at best for the Kinky monthly event (often a lot less).

I know she doesn't want it, we had a talk before a few times, she always cares about her work and does her best with every release. But can't really blame her for trying to still sell something on the MP either, and if the only way to do so these days is to join the system instead of trying to fight against it... well, that's pretty sad, but it's a reality.

MP's search was already awful before, but with changes LL made last year it's worse than ever now, even if some people here on the forums keep trying to defend it. It is usable still, yes, and the options on the left side help, boolean search is also there. But those extra options should be an addition to already easy to use and working search, not a requirement that makes the search slightly more tolerable.

Edited February 7 by steeljane42

[Sid Nagy]

Guess what, there are commercial companies who help other companies to "optimize" search results in Google.
Can't say that they are shady.
The search engines always have rules (algorithms) and it is always possible to get better results with adequate knowledge.

Edited February 7 by Sid Nagy

[Flea Yatsenko]

26 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Guess what, there are commercial companies who help other companies to "optimize" search results in Google.
Can't say that they are shady.
The search engines always have rules (algorithms) and it is always possible to get better results with adequate knowledge.

Most of the results in Google are all SEO optimized garbage. Most of them follow a very specific formula, being a huge article with a common query in a headline tag followed by a few paragraphs of keyword spam with a sentence or two of relevant information.

I think what's concerning is that Google is always changing their algorithm and SEO is a constant battle of trying to figure out how the algorithm has changed. The algo for SLMP search is already known, spam your keyword as much as you can and don't say more than you have to.

Google and web is about browser intent, looking for information. SLMP, Amazon, etc are about purchase intent, trying to find something to buy. It's a lot easier to look at some text and figure out what the text is about, than it is to have text about a product and figure out if the product is good enough to rank highly or not.

Amazon's primary ranking algorithm is sales velocity (selling faster and faster, or slower or slower, or not at all). It also tracks things like if a visitor to the page bought the product or not.

SLMP doesn't do anything like that beyond the top 50k in sales. It's just keyword spam below that. Just my two cents but if Amazon depended entirely on the product descriptions being optimized and had nothing to do with the quality of the product, it wouldn't be very good.

I'm not asking SLMP to be as good as Amazon search. But there's so much more it does to determine a quality search result than just looking at text document relevancy. The problem with SLMP is that the search algorithm is so simple that it's extremely easy to game and nothing to hold it back. Someone could easily just sell a prim cube and write up the description properly and appear in the top results for just about anything not major.

https://www.anscommerce.com/blog/amazon-seo-strategy/

[Sid Nagy]

 

9 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

But there's so much more it does to determine a quality search result than just looking at text document relevancy. The problem with SLMP is that the search algorithm is so simple that it's extremely easy to game and nothing to hold it back. Someone could easily just sell a prim cube and write up the description properly and appear in the top results for just about anything not major.

I agree with that, but SL merchants have to work with what they get offered and make the best out of it , so they use the SEO that works.

LL has very little to gain with a lot of effort to improve the search engine IMHO. The marketplace isn't their big money maker. More a L$ sink. It doesn't really matter to the Lab who buys what from whom, as long as the MP sinks enough L$ through their commissions. So it will not be on their priority list as long as the MP doesn't collapse totally. As long as there is enough buying activity their all good.

[PheebyKatz]

3 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

The search string "The plant that I'm looking for"  should lead to the right plants on the first page.

 

They need to make this happen. Elon, come on, dude, I know you're inworld somewhere. Help them do this on the MP.

[Clem Marques]

11 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Once you are out of the top 50k, which is pretty easy to do if you're not selling mainstream products (like clothing), it only seems to care about keywords. And it's pretty easy to game, honestly. As @Clem Marques noted so well, you can just spam the keyword you're targeting and leave out anything else and you'll rank higher. And if you're out of the top 50k best selling, it's extremely effective.

It actively inhibits writing detailed, in depth descriptions. In inhibits coming up with clever product names. The only thing the new search has done is cut down on people spamming irrelevant keywords. But it's gone so far in the opposite direction that it's not helpful. Any sort of wordy, clever name and description gets buried by "plants plants plants plants plants" features: "Plants plants plants plants plants"

I fully agree with you. The loss of creative product titles and listings is one of the side unfortunate effects of the current search algorithm used in the MP. Another side effect of it is good, popular creators getting buried under "feature/keyword spam" content or gachas, to the point where you in some cases have to go out of your way and search for the store you want in the "Merchants/Store" tab to even find it. I'm sure that affects their sales negatively.

Sure, an experienced SL user likely knows how to work around the MP issues, but a new user won't know how to do it, and will likely have a very frustrating experience trying to shop in the Marketplace. That doesn't help SL's user rentention issues. 

But apparently as long as the items "look pretty good, actually" it's fine. That's ok. But I am curious about how this will play out in the long run. Maybe most of the listings will have very short, bland titles in an attempt to get the algorithm to work in the seller's favor, and we'll struggle to find what we are looking for more than ever before as customers. I hope it doesn't reach that point.

4 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I'm not asking SLMP to be as good as Amazon search. But there's so much more it does to determine a quality search result than just looking at text document relevancy. The problem with SLMP is that the search algorithm is so simple that it's extremely easy to game and nothing to hold it back. Someone could easily just sell a prim cube and write up the description properly and appear in the top results for just about anything not major.

Exactly!

3 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

I agree with that, but SL merchants have to work with what they get offered and make the best out of it , so they use the SEO that works.

Yes. The issue is not the sellers, they are just doing what they can to get good results. That's fair, as long as they do it within TOS.

It's the Marketplace that is the issue.

3 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

So it will not be on their priority list as long as the MP doesn't collapse totally. As long as there is enough buying activity their all good.

Fair enough. This is likely why it will take forever for the Marketplace search to be "fixed", if it ever happens at all. As long as it keeps making money, it doesn't matter from a business standpoint.

Edited February 8 by Clem Marques

[PheebyKatz]

I'm such a low-level creator/marketer that it's basically a hobby that pays for itself, but compared to what I'd normally expect under such circumstances, and with everything that seems like it would work against me, I actually do pretty well, on a relative scale. I look at how many people view my stuff, and I'm just like, wow, people actually find my stuff and look at it and buy it.

I can only imagine how much I'd be making if everyone with unrelated products wasn't using the keywords "homemade bunny puppet high-LI motorcycle impale yourself on a sharp stick", just like me.