Grumpity Linden

So odd, because we haven't been able to reproduce this on facebook - the middle image in the gallery gets chosen (across accounts and different pages we are getting the same result): we do see the same as you on twitter. Jo, would you file a jira please, so we can get your browser specs and all that and look for a repro.

Marianne, Jo, and DelfinJonay, did you test with an alt? Visitors should be routed to the Landing point if one is set. Only those with permissions to override it, will (which doesn't negate the rest of your request for setting a different location than the landing point or the center - but does make it less urgent).

It’s been a few days since the unfortunate events… we’d like to let you know what we’ve been up to. As we mentioned before, we’ve introduced several precautions to keep this from happening again. Ever. We’ve also done a few feature releases, and are continuing to work on making Place Pages a valuable showcase of some of the amazing things inside Second Life. We just released an “Items for Sale” feature, which includes search and a way to TP in directly to the item on your parcel: check out Bella Moda for an example! We continue to tweak the search feature to improve discoverability for all Place Pages (there’s more work there to be done, and the previously indexed pages are still showing up). We’ve added a “Last Edited By” indicator in the Admin Panel for all group owned parcels, which makes tracking of changes a lot easier. Fixed some bugs, too. We have even more improvements in the works: landing page improvements, more discoverable pages, search results cleanup, bulk management, polish/clean up work around the markdown feature, and page performance tweaks. We’re considering all your feature requests and are planning on rolling some out pretty soon as well! Keep an eye out for updates, and please keep the pages coming!

While we try to inject some levity into our postmortems, we don’t actually take the problems lightly and we are very much aware of the effort that people had put into working on their place pages. Please believe us that we took this situation seriously and have put in place numerous safeguards going forward. Unfortunately, none of these things will help bring back the content that you, and many Lindens as well, had spent time customizing and getting just right. It especially burns to cause this pain to our early adopters - we only hope that you will be able to restore your confidence in Place Pages - we know you can see their potential for showcasing your world!

Hi fernando90, Would you please submit a bug report in jira with the details so we could investigate further and try to reproduce the issue you're seeing on the marketplace? Thanks! https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/CreateIssue!default.jspa

Sassy, that's the plan

We've got a jira for that and a theory behind it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-11051 No promises on timeline for a fix, but it's on our radar.

Iren, are you using Internet Explorer? If so, please try a different browser (Chrome or Firefox would be best). If not, please file a jira with your system info. (Whirly's comment above points to the known issue with IE). And please do try to follow some of the tips on the forums for cleaning up keywords & other listing improvements. If you need assistance, please file a support ticket and Dakota should be able to help you out! Thank you!

ChinRey, you know the old saying about how if there's two ways to interpret my words and one of them makes you mad, I meant the other one? So - of course not! What we mean is that sales rank is one of the factors that affect future search rank, but not on a per-keyword basis.

Hi! First, we understand and appreciate the frustration merchants have faced when changes to search impact their sales. We had tried to offset some of these frustrations by having a long beta period that allowed merchants to test search results for their products before the changes became permanent, and we took a lot of feedback and bug reports during this time and made changes based on the feedback. We carefully monitor the overal and daily marketplace sales volume and assure you that it has remained steady and upbeat since the Search changes deployed. However, we also appreciate that it's cold comfort to those merchants whose sales have been negatively affected. Here are a few pointers for making sure that your items can be found by relevant searches: * Make sure you pick a clear, concise item name. Using a number designation like BD-802 will not help find your item if the item is Boys Denim Jeans. * One thing merchants forget to fill out is the Features List. This can reinforce the keywords and item names in Marketplace Search. * The most important change is the new conversions algorithm. This new algorithm means that over time the Marketplace Search will better learn what items are being purchased based on search. * Make sure that you use only appropriate keywords. Using inappropriate keywords on your listing will cause your items to sink in relevance because your item will be shown in search returns, but never purchased, or purchased far less than other items that were searched, and purchased, using the same keywords. With all that said, there are still a few open bugs with Marketplace Search - for example, the overly plentiful fuzzy search results. We're working on getting those under control. Thank you for your continued patience as we work through these.

Good evening! We've reindexed the entire marketplace, which, we believe, should resolve any ghosting issues and missing new listings. We belive we've fixed the problem with related listings as well. We've addressed a small issue giving a surprising boost to some listings. We've also fixed ANS notifications for real now. Hopefully, this will address the most pressing problems and get everyone through the weekend in good shape. We don't expect that these fixes would have addressed other issues with Best Selling sort. We'll get back to those on Monday. Thank you!

Good evening! We've reindexed the entire marketplace, which, we believe, should resolve any ghosting issues and missing new listings. We belive we've fixed the problem with related listings as well. We've addressed a small issue giving a surprising boost to some listings. We've also fixed ANS notifications for real now. Hopefully, this will address the most pressing problems and get everyone through the weekend in good shape. We don't expect that these fixes would have addressed other issues with Best Selling sort. We'll get back to those on Monday. Thank you!

Hi! Sorry for the few days of silence from our side - we've been trying to figure out the cause of these issues and our plan of action. Thank you for providing us with the additional information! What do we see going on? - Items are ghosting (deleted listings coming back). New listings are sometimes missing. Fix: We need to do a reindex of the entire SL Marketplace. - Related & demo products can't be associated, affecting listings from ~July forward. Fix: It's a straight up bug and we have a fix, planning to roll out tomorrow if it passes QA. - Best selling sort, inexplicable boost for some unrelated items, other ranking & boost issues: This one is a multi-part issue. We have a fix for one part of it, also rolling out tomorrow. Once we've got the other issues cleared, we'll be able to better investigate this and see what else may have been obscured by the bigger problems. - But we had Beta Search running for so long, how did we not catch this before release? Good question! Part of the answer is that because Beta Search was running in parallel with the old search, we had to construct some mechanisms to allow for that, which unfortunately obscured these issues. We didn't realize, for example, how often the parity jobs (ones that updated the index from production to beta) were failing, so we didn't see that a full reindex should have happened before we rolled over to the new search as default. We're paying attention to your reports, and will be going back to verify which of the issues have not been resolved once the reindex is complete and we roll out the fixes we have so far. Please bear with us while we clean up this spill...

Good news is, you should still be able to skip the CAPTCHA step and click Send Instructions to get the reset email. Bad news is, it will take us a few days to address this. As always, thanks for your patience!

Hi Phil, We've got a fix out in the next version of the Maintenance viewer RC: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Release/4.0.4.313869 Thanks!

We believe this issue has been addressed. All, please let us know if you are seeing old removed listings creep up again on the Beta. Thank you!

Hi Trinity, That's a regression, we're looking into it. Thanks for posting about it. While we investigate, those listings have been blocked so they're no longer visible in your store. Dear all, if you notice other regressions in the beta, please file a jira. We love it when we get jira with detailed info! Thanks

Since we can't all be like Whirly (which is really too bad) we plan on adding a link to a short Search How-To that enumerates available syntax and gives some examples. Thanks!

A quick note to let you know that we're also working on making exact match work when adding quotation marks around a search term. So, for example, searching for "mesh" would not return any fuzzy matches and you wouldn't get Mash or Mush in your search results. We will update when that change goes out, and this should address some of the requests voiced in previous comments. Thanks!

It is one of the many things we have on the list of Marketplace bugs and features and quite outside the scope of the BetaSearch project. I can neither confirm nor deny that this will become a reality.

I think what we are looking for is something more along the lines of "We think recent sales are higher in relevance, followed by those with good ratings and then finally those with the most views in the past 30 days." That sort of global overall priority ranking among the available inputs would satisfy a pretty major group of us. May I coax you into giving us something along those lines that is "official"? Darrius, what you're describing are boost factors we might use in sorting relevant results. This is a formula we tweak but it uses a weighted combination of sales data and various fields' matches to searched terms. However, this is just the frosting on the relevance recipe, and because there is a rich tradition of trying to "game" the search results, we really can't give too much away . I will reiterate that the learning algorithm in the new search system will take conversions into account so we will continue to adjust the ingredients of the frosting once this goes to production.

Arwen Serpente wrote: Thank you Grumpity. With regard to the definition of "relevance", all I wanted was a simple explanation in layman's terms, but in lieu of that your description of the "secret sauce recipe" does satisfy me to a certain extent. With regard to the "best selling" bug and also the "missing items in stores" bug (that needs to reindexed), when should we be looking for those to take effect in the Beta Search site? Best Selling: we'll keep you updated on the progress. Reindex: it will be a slow rolling reindex, and we will post when it completes, but don't hold your breath yet! Certainly before this goes to production

Much has been written on the art and science of search relevancy in both technical whitepapers and industry publications and online sources. It's a mysterious combination of factors that should, with a little fairy dust, give every user the results they are looking for. The actual algorithms involved are complex and varied, depending on, among other things, the specifics of search areas. The measure of success is also up for debate in the literature, but we can likely settle on Precision and Recall as an adequately acceptable answer. It is most certainly outside the scope of this forum to get into much detail on this very complex topic. Therefore the best feedback for us is what we have gotten here so far (particularly in jira with details) where search results do not meet expectations and later on we will be measuring marketplace volume and conversions from search results to assess whether our changes have been successful. We can certainly appreciate your frustration with the difficulty of pinning down search relevance, but unfortunately cannot resolve it. Better news on Best Selling sort - there's a bug in there and we're investigating. Updates on that soon.

A quick update on open bugs: BUG-10688 ( Marketplace Beta Results do not take into account frequency of Sale when ranked by "Relevance") - has been fixed. BUG-10761 ([sLM Beta Search] Boolean search only returning a few results for certain search terms when there should be thousands ) has been fixed. BUG-10762 ( [sLM Beta Search] Beta search often fails to return a lot of relevant search results) is looking better. We currently believe that discrepancies in count are due to issues with keeping all the listing data in synch between standard search and beta. Additional investigation ongoing. BUG-10769 ( [sLM Beta Search] Some store pages have missing listings when using beta search ) is due to an indexing issue with beta. We're getting rolling reindex of the entire marketplace going, and in the meantime, if editing the "missing" listing via betasearch-marketplace does not fix it, please file a new jira. BUG-10799 ([sLM Beta Search] Using Boolean search terms causes [Relevance] results to lose ranking from sales popularity.) - We're looking into it. Thank you!

We dug into this and it appears to be an indexing error for every case we checked so far - there will be another reindex of the entire marketplace but there's an easy fix in the meantime - if you know what's missing, please go in to your store (via beta-search) and "tickle" the listing - make an update of some sort to it. That should take care of it (Whirly and animorf, you'll notice you now have same number of items in beta and production). If it doesn't - we really want to know - that would be another class of bug. Again, please be assured that we'll make sure all the MP items have been reindexed before we roll this search to production.