In my shop, I have vendors with gifting capabilities. Visitors to the shop can click on the "Gift" button, input the name of the intended recipient into a text box, and send them a gift copy of the item in the vendor.
My script used llHTTPRequest to parse results from vrsearch.secondlife.com through a Google app (name2key) to return the key of the avatar in question. If the requested name didn't exist, it got flagged as such; if it did exist, it would return the correct key, every time.
With vrsearch.secondlife.com down, I cannot do this. I've rescripted to use http://search.secondlife.com/client_search.php as the search engine, but it's kludgey at best because it is dependent upon the customer inputting the name correctly. If they put in a Display Name, they can get any number of odd results. I've worked around this by scripting in an extra "Please confirm that you wish to send this gift to [NAME]" dialog, but that is a less than ideal situation.
Since you seem to be saying --repeatedly-- that vrsearch.secondlife.com being down is a non-issue, I was wondering if you had some sort of script you'd be willing to share with the rest of us that will allow me to have a user input a name, and have it checked against SL's search database for (a) existence/non-existence and (b) return an absolutely correct UUID.
Thanks in advance.