Paid Classifieds – Relevancy v Price

Inworld paid classifieds have generally been pretty straight forward, best price wins. However there’s a frustrating aspect of this, one which was at one time addressed by the paid classifieds bar only showing exact phrase matches. The problem is that if you search for say: Medieval Market, you’ll get the top paid results that use either of those words, rather than the phrase or both words:

The above search was done searching everything, so groups, places etc. will be in the left hand side, on the right hand side are paid classifieds which automatically sort by price. The results on the left hand side are relevant, the results on the right hand side, they aren’t really relevant.

Now to further demonstrate the problem, I’ll search for Medieval Market but this time, I’ll search classifieds only, which means only classifieds will be returned:

Again we can see that the results on the left hand side are relevant and the results on the right hand side are not. This is because those on the right are sorted by price and price chooses either of the two words, with highest price winning. This is further exemplified if I sort the results of my classified search by price, instead of relevancy:

Now the results on the left, match those on the right. However, how helpful is this for someone who is searching for a Medieval Market? I’d argue that it’s not very helpful at all. The top result when you sort by price is for a Christmas Market, this is the default top result in the paid classifieds bar on the right no matter how you sort your search results:

Now I’m sure this is a very nice Christmas Market and the people behind this classified are advertising sleigh rides, ice skaing and a seasonal market, it’s a nice thing to see being advertised, but it’s not what I’m looking for when I’m searching for a Medieval Market.

There is a bit of an issue here, Linden Lab are trying to give value for money for the people paying most for their classfieds, they are gaining greater visibility, but with my searching for something hat on, I don’t find the results in the right hand paid classifieds window to be helpful, to the point I’ll end up glossing over them.

Let’s take a step back, there is an argument for the highest paid classifieds getting better visibility, but that isn’t exactly what’s happening here, I’m getting results for Medieval or Market in the right hand window, so there is a degree of relevancy involved, it’s just that it’s done in such a way that the results are irrelevant, they aren’t the top paid inworld classifieds as a whole, there are far more expensive adverts out there.

Then we come to the issue of the merchants or places who are using the classified system to advertise their wares, are they really being served well by a system that buries their relevant adverts beneath irrelevant adverts? The L$30 show in places seems to give better visibility by default and yet the minimum price for a classified is L$50.

Surely relevance and price should play a role here, the highest priced most relevant adverts should appear first. I can appreciate this isn’t easy to achieve but the way things currently work should be looked at again. As I said at the start, there was a time when paid classifieds were only showing exact phrase matches in that right hand window, this wasn’t ideal as relevant Medieval Markets would be omitted, but it would be better if exact phrase matches were at least the top returned results, and then they were sorted by price before the results that only had one word or the other appeared.