I’ve been frustrated by the new search, suspicious of it from the first day it was mooted at an office hour.
However, I did a search for “Ladies Clothes” and find myself fourth in the list, indeed as the three results above me are places this means that in terms of relevancy, my avatar is the most relevant avatar in the whole of Second Life for “Ladies Clothes”.
No I don’t wear ladies clothes! However this tells me that “Ladies Clothes” isn’t really a popular search term. So hey, I’m learning something new.
The point with the new search is that it doesn’t give me any faith in the classified system, you’d need to be paying a fortune for any sort of visibility in the new search whereas the old search lists a lot more results per page.
They’re working on it, it’s under development but it’s a great shame that they are still using traffic as a factor, traffic is so misleading. The important stat, the stat that isn’t available is sales to visitors ratio for a business need. I can sell more in a location where traffic is in double figures than I do at a location where traffic is in four figures.
The other side of this is of course camping and the misuse of bots. I don’t have a big problem with camping if it’s used ethically, I like money trees too, in fact I prefer money trees, what’s the point of an avatar sitting in one location for hours when you could have many avatars arriving? I’ve always thought that the idea of freebies, camping, money trees etc. is to empower residents to have money to spend inworld and if they like your location, isn’t the idea that they will spend their money there? Tell their friends? Increase your visibility?
I’d also like to see more value in the classified system, the new search simply doesn’t give good value.
I’ve been looking for good locations for advertising, I’m not talking about ad farms, I’m talking about billboards that blend in with the area such as a wall in a busy location but the busy locations are often just full of camping bots and not real avatars so it’s a minefield trying to find a location that gives good exposure. I’d have thought the advertising market here would be thriving, but alas that doesn’t seem to be the case.