Improve Marketplace search functions!!

[Mira Kamiguwa]

Since xstreet changed to marketplace the search function seems to be very off.  For example here are a number of keywords and there results: 

House 

Given results:

Patulas House Black and white ribbon heels 

Promo!! K&L 3LectriK kitty (female)

Adult pilo pillow

Dress

Mens formal dress shoes

Hat

Compleat avatar box

Gothica Chick avatar 

I beleave the search fuction is picking up keywords people are using to wrogly label their items to improve selling results.  So please use proper key words :)

 

[Paula001 Goldschein]

Hi Mira

I am kinda responsible for the pillow pile one ..

house is a keyword in the listing .. like cuz it's an indoor piece of furniture.

Also the other top results you have mentioned make perfect sense to me .. the shoes, well it's the merchants name or store name - the kitty outfits are probably aiming towards house music with the 'house' in keywords

 

I didn't look in the hat search..

 

Edited: kinda like your *home* keyword in your Lap dance sofa

[Nalates Urriah]

SL Search in world and in the Market Place is a disaster. But, it is fair. Everyone gets an equal chance to come up first. The team working on search and the MP site have been taking heat for some time. You can read through http://www.dgp4sl.com/wp/ for information on the state of search in SL. Darrius has provided the most factual information I've come across. He rants a bit now and then but mostly his points are rational.

As to getting everyone to cooperate so the right results come up is never going to happen. Human nature simply doesn't work that way. Everyone is always working to get the most customers. That is the point of the free market and freedom in general.

It is up to the search engine operator to make things work no matter what merchants do. Google can be spammed and sites pushed to s top ranking that misleads searchers. But, get caught misleading or spamming Google and they remove you from the database. But, that is not really fair.

Of course that SL promo adds are failing to come up in the right results is also a problem for merchants. But, its ok for them to pay for those ads. Some feel they work, others of us test and explore and feel they aren't working. Everything I see indicates to me they are working to allow everyone to have a place in the results. The problem with that is searchers stop relying on search.

Yesterday I was trying to help someone find some sculpty feet that were simple bare feet. Searching in-world was a disaster. Searching in the Market Place gave me very little. I do SEO work iRL. I test and experiment with search terms every week. I got really frustrated trying to find bare feet in the MP.

I resorted to posting in several groups that I belong to and getting LM's and recommendation from friends. With their help I soon found what we needed.

I doubt anything in SL Search is going to change until SL users riot or there is some shake up in the Commerce Team.

[Josh Susanto]

My seamless basket sculpt is still doing OK in the men's footwear category.

[Anaiya Arnold]

Petulia is innocent!

 

It's because of her store name, "Petualias House". Everything in her store and every other store that puts "house" in its store name will be returned if you search for actual houses. 

That Gothic Chick avatar,  if it's the set I'm thinking of, it does indeed include a hat.

 I think unless your search term is so obscure that there is low or no competition over first page placement, or the result is returning way back on page 299 or something,  someone would report it and it would have had a once over. It's difficult to believe the commerce team are not well aware that by design, their search system routinely returns utterly irrelevant results that cannot be filtered out, no matter how well merchants use the key words and put things in proper categories, and refrain from obnoxious or "cheating" practices.  If merchants behave perfectly in these respects, we still get to see Petulia's shoes when we just want to buy a house.

[Voodoo Radek]

When i am not happy with my search on the marketplace i find myself ruling out the inworld search and asking my friends for their favorite stores. The word of mouth works certantly better than the SL search (both).