Trip Hastings

Perrie Juran wrote: "I've been using this for years and never noticed it/realized what it was." Not meaning to insult you by this but this highlights a big problem in and with SL: People not paying attention. I've been guilty of it at times also. It can happen to the best of us. People get in a hurry for self gratification (which kind of is the reason we are in SL ) and don't read the manual. Or in some cases they are just too dumb do look. Did they take five minutes to browse through the tabs in the Preferences menu to see what's in it? Sure I know some things are complex and take time to learn such as scripting. But the number of ultra basic questions we get asked in the Forum sometimes seems like overkill. Did the people even notice there is a 'Knowledge Base' tab here and bother to look what's in it? Time and time again we simply quote from the KB when answering peoples questions though many of us simply give them the link because our attitude is that it's not our job to read for them. We get chastised as being 'unfriendly' here for that attitude but I don't see for one moment what is wrong with that. Was it there all this time? If so, hey, my bad. I never needed it, so I never looked for it. I don't find that to be an unreasonable, or uncommon response. It's just human nature. A little embarrassing, but not shameful. Especially when it comes to SL, where there is just SO MUCH to process. The problem with a "RTFM!" attitude is that it fails to take into account the many different ways people process information, and their starting levels of familiarity with the systems involved. For instance, some may have no idea what a "Knowledge Base" is and never investigate it as part of their search. Or, they may look and decide they don't know how to ask the right question of it, or where the information might be sorted. They may be approaching things from an entirely different perspective than the framers of the help system, and looking in all the wrong places. Or just have the wrong idea about how things work in the first place. They might find the answer and not understand it. Or, and I am as guilty of this as any, they might just be impatient. That's human nature too. There's a LOT out there to process, after all. Not to say people, even ones asking for help, can't be jerks for no good reason. But hostility and impatience does breed the same.

Pamela Galli wrote: I consider the three search tabs all more "easy to notice" and "hard to miss" than otherwise. So what is an example of it being more useful to find a creator or store in product search than creator and store search? Ok, a generalized example: You are interested in a new avatar created by a store. Let's call the maker "Floogle". You want to see what sort of Floogle avatars there are, and what sort of compatible third-party products exist. The avatars themselves may or may not be labeled as "Floogle". After all, that's the store name. The seller may not have thought it necessary. So it is overall simplest to just search for Floogle and see what comes up. You get both the original avatar product and associated compatible items created by a third party. Again, a generalized example. Specifics may vary. Your view on how commonplace this might be may differ from mine.

Pamela Galli wrote: Yes, always been there, I use it all the time. It is right there with the other tabs, so not sure why it would be hard to see. If you think there is a reason to include House of Shoes store in a product search of "house", then there must be a reason to search for products in creator/ store search, too. Less "hard to see" and more "ease to not notice". I'm not sure how I missed it all this time, if it's truly always been there. I asked a friend about it and he told me he'd never seen it either until someone pointed it out to him a few weeks ago. But that's a very small sample size. On your other point, yes, that's certainly a negative case. There are also positives. Hence my suggestion of a toggleable filter. There's plusses and minuses to almost any limitation or lack thereof. It's all about what gives the most useful results.

Pamela Galli wrote: Trip Hastings wrote: Pamela Galli wrote: and I thought they had filtered out store and creator names from product search but sounds like they reintroduced those. Ugh. Is this a thing people complained about having in the search? I can't count the number of times I've looked up a user or store name on MP after trying to work out where what someone is wearing came from. I guess everybody uses Marketplace differently. There is a separate creator / store search. Including creator and store names in product search is monumentally stupid. Is there? *looks* Huh, there is; there's a tab for it. I've been using this for years and never noticed it/realized what it was. Has it always been there? I would almost swear that it was not. Well, that IS handy. But it's only "stupid", monumentally or otherwise, if you know it's an option. I hope they continue to work on it to better integrate it into the search experience. Including exact matches (just the top ones if multiples) in the main search results could be a nice touch. I still don't find it to be particularly harmful to the search results, since there are good use cases for including it as much as there are occasions where it muddles the listings. Perhaps a checkbox filter to enable/disable it?

Pamela Galli wrote: and I thought they had filtered out store and creator names from product search but sounds like they reintroduced those. Ugh. Is this a thing people complained about having in the search? I can't count the number of times I've looked up a user or store name on MP after trying to work out where what someone is wearing came from. I guess everybody uses Marketplace differently.

Freya Mokusei wrote: Trip Hastings wrote: Searching for a simple word should reasonably return results based strongly on that word, though that is of course my opinion. That wouldn't be considered a useful way for the engine to respond. It wouldn't let the user find similar words that they might instead be searching for (again, my example of laptop vs. computer). The idea would be that a search for computer could return laptops, and this diversity allows better targetting in secondary queries. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just explaining how search engines were designed - they anticipate that the user is just as faulty as the indexing mechanism. They're not humans. Machine systems become flawed every time they encounter humans (at least until we do a little better at AI). Humans are adjusting to the way search strategy works (a vital skill!) but it's slow, and the SL userbase is not tech-savvy by average. I agree the service provider could make assisting the user more of a priority, but remember their background: In Silicon Valley, everyone knows how to Google - everyone who works on Marketplace probably understands syntax-based searching. This is probably a blindspot to them (blindspots are bad) - fortunately exposure helps, those who've used search tools for a while are improving. I agree we're looking at different angles, I hope you've not read my posts as taking 'a side', there's opportunities for improvement everywhere. I'm explaining my perspective based on my background, which is... largely speaking to machines, and not humans. Keyword searches are an element that humans are moving beyond as well, and our marketplace ecosystem is too complex to support them (and has always been - 'SMB' is just a very good example of why). A search engine only knows "laptop" is a close equivalent to "computer" if it has been taught that it is so, whether by human hands or data analysis. If it doesn't know or can't know that X is approximately equal to Y, why would it ever need to present Y when looking for X? I am suggesting that the system's ability to make "bad guesses" is overly broad in some way, and may require refining. To refer back to an earlier point, I'd say a thesaurus might be a little more useful as a relevancy check than a spell checker. While you may disagree, that is my firm opinion. I do, however, agree that user experience is very frequently disregarded by technology developers. Because as you said, machines are not human. Therefore it's up to humans to ensure they're properly designed to be useful TO humans. It's my sincere hope that someone with an eye for user experience sees all this and determines a way to address it. It may not be the most common use case, but it's a legitimate one. In a case like this, the Relevance sort option becomes the only one with any strong usefulness (though people seem to have strong opinions on how well THAT works now). Perhaps if there was a search mode that weighted relevance alongside other factors (sort by age, price, etc) and presented the best results. That would be nice. Less accurate than simple keyword searching, but with the advantages of fuzzy search intact.

Freya Mokusei wrote: It sounds like you're seeing this a lot, especially because of the variance in the number of results. What absolutely isn't happening, is a change to the search mechanisms over this short of a timespan. You're not seeing new changes each time you get a different number. You're just seeing a series of different bad guesses at what you probably mean. Perhaps I should have also asked YOU to not mention it again as well... anyway. Actually, I believe what triggers the change in the number of results is new items added to the Marketplace that have the actual key term (or possibly also some close guesses) included. I've seen the number stay stable for extended periods (I look it up frequently when I get bored), and then shift. Previously it was a relatively stable range right above 10,000, only shifting in relatively small amounts when it did change. I only felt the need to point it out as a flaw in the system when it suddenly skyrocketed. For instance, in just the last short span of time, several SMB items were added, and the number has dropped significantly (though still very high). I do actually understand the concept of a fuzzy search. The results being returned may well make sense to a machine, but as I believe you said, not to a human. That doesn't make the system less flawed. Ideally, the system should return results based on the way it is likely to be used, rather than expecting users to conform to an imposed syntax, as much as possible. Searching for a simple word should reasonably return results based strongly on that word, though that is of course my opinion. If the system can't be relied upon to intelligently determine the closest matches and present them to the user, then it needs to at least provide instruction on how to improve the results received along with those results, on screen, at the time the search is performed. I do applaud the fairly clear and concise instruction provided on the "Help" link on the top menu bar on the Marketplace webpage, but from a user experience perspective it is perhaps somewhat insufficient in terms of presentation. In fact, as a Second Life user, I initially completely ignored it, as I assumed it would present the same page the Help link that virtually any other Second Life website gives (including this one), that being the general Second Life support portal. These forums, for instance, have a specialized "Community Help" link that is clearly unique and contextual to the use of the Forum. Edited to add a summary: You're seem to be clearly looking at this purely from a technical database and algorithm perspective. I am much more focused on the user experience angle. The simple keyword approach may not have been the most robust, but for very simple searches, it was much more intuitive.

Freya Mokusei wrote: Trip Hastings wrote: As opposed to concrete statistics of my personal sales. This would still be anecdotal! Fuzzy matching on short search strings is intentional. It's considered poor behaviour to not attempt to complete a "short" query. It would be rare or unlikely that a three-character search string would be seen as 'complete' - precision is required. The statement was anecdotal vis a vis the overall "marketplace sales are down" narrative, regardless of statistics. But in reference to an analysis of my personal sales, and that alone (which is the context I used to word in), giving statistics would have been hard evidence, not anecdotal. Why is this pedantry even being addressed? *headache* I won't mention it again. On the actual topic at hand, if the search cannot handle a short term that appears in thousands of products' descriptive text, then I would have to assume it is not indexed properly. Your example of a spellchecker is telling. It only gives suggestions for alternates because it does not recognize the term. As an aside, searching for smb (sans quotes) now returns 27,002 items, an increase of over 6,000 since I first posted a few hours ago. For whatever that's worth or means.

ChinRey wrote: That's probably because searches without quotes use fuzzy matching and with a keyword like that things can get really fuzzy. Just take a look at the suggestions the spellchecker on this forum has for SMB. My suggestion being that perhaps the fuzzy matching is OVERLY so when singular terms are used.

Yes. Anecdotal as it relates to me, based on my general recollection. As opposed to concrete statistics of my personal sales. I wasn't claiming to speak for everyone. Geez. Edited to add: Except it's not (just) a three letter acronym. It's a descriptive term for a (relatively, within a niche group) major product with many users. Perhaps you could take the time to review my second post, in which I posted statistics for other single word search terms.

I feel like you have drastically (and perhaps deliberately) missed the point of my posting. This has nothing at all to do with a failure in my search skills, or anyone else's. First off, I did say right off the bat that "SMB" gets the desired results (in this case, any and all SMB-related products). The problem comes when I search for SMB, without the quotes. I expect a large number of result (in this case, the 8,252 you mentioned). I expect keyword-relevant results. Some variation between the two makes sense, except that the vast majority of results returned (at current search, 20,564) have ZERO apparent relevance to the search term. This conclusion is based on a random sampling of items chosen from the first 96 results of the search, sorted by Newest, selected from items that do not have SMB in the titles. The page source code was examined to get a full context of all descriptive elements, including keywords. Understand, I am not LOOKING for highly refined search results for specific products in this search. Simply all relevant ones. I sort by Newest to find whatever has been most recently released. Under default settings, I must sort through several pages of results before I find the very first one that in any way relates to my term. In the previous iteration, enclosing the term in quote marks was not required. I gather that when searching without them, the back end uses a fuzzy logic routine to determine possible alternate related terms. It is clearly prone to being overly broad in scope when a single term is used. As a test, I tried a few other single word search terms. The term computer, for instance, returns 20,502 results, while "computer" returns 3,536. The term house returns 320,058 results, while "house" returns only 145,513 results. The term soda returns 5,451 results, while "soda" only returns 2,050 results. In each case, the top results when sorted for Relevance (yes, the default) were similar, but other sorting methods gave very different output.

I'd like to throw in a commentary relevant to my own products and interest. I create for (and use) items made to work with the SMB mesh body. As such, I routinely search for the term SMB on Marketplace, sorted by Newest. Since the new Marketplace "upgrade", that search has become entirely useless. I have since learned that I can use the term "SMB" (note the quote marks) to get the results I want, but not everyone is going to figure that out. To illustrate exactly why this is such a problem, I'll present the following statistics. - A search for "SMB" returns approximately 8500 results, and has done so reliably, increasing steadily only when new items are added. This is consistent with the pre-upgrade numbers, and returns 99% relevant results. - A search for SMB done approximately 12 hours ago returned approximately 11500 results, with a very significant number of them completely irrelevant (a random sampling reveals absolutely no relation to the search term anywhere in the title, description, keywords, etc.). - A search for SMB performed about 5 minutes ago returned a staggering 20500 results, with the problems of the previous search obviously massively compounded. I had previously observed the number fluctuating up and down to a much smaller degree (no more than 1000, though that's still significant). This is simply absurd. And, just to add one more voice to what others have said, my sales have most definitely almost completely dropped off since the new code went in. I don't keep sales stats, so that's purely anecdotal, but there it is.