Linden Lab have issued a call to arms with a recent blog post about plans to improve SL Marketplace search. There’s a survey link in the blog post.
Search has been done and redone and done again in Second Life. There’s only so much you can do with search relevancy because people are gits when it comes to trying to manipulate search results. In Second Life we’ve seen the use of bots to increase traffic and therefore relevancy. We’ve seen the age old classic of using search terms that have no bearing on what the parcel or marketplace listing offers.
I can recall in the 0ld days, possibly whilst it was still XStreetSL, people using white text on a white background to hide keywords that were not remotely related to the listing. People abusing the system, unsettles any search engine and unfortunately, people will abuse the system.
Then there are issues that are pretty unique to the SL Marketplace which are caused by the system itself. The free listing forever policy means search results are cluttered with lots of old content that has been created by people who are no longer active in Second Life. There’s an argument for keeping content around, old content doesn’t mean bad content but content should ideally be tied to an active avatar.
Then there are issues such as demos and colours. Demos are an important tool for customers. Different colours offer different options for customers. However they should not be individual listings. Different colours and the demo should be available via one item display. This would make browsing stores on the SL Marketplace easier for a start.
When someone is using search, they just want to find relevant results and then be able to compare relevant results. That’s pretty much all people want to do. If you search for a Blue Shirt, you want to find Blue Shirts.
People then want a sensibly sized list to wade through. When there are well over 1,000 pages, people simply are not going to want to wade through that. People want to be able to easily exclude or include certain brands. People want boolean options and here, there’s a bit of an issue over documentation because boolean searches are available on the marketplace, there just seems to be a lack of documentation about it, which makes building queries difficult.
For example : Inara Pey NOT Tutorial will bring me items from Inara Pey that do not have the word Tutorial in them. However I have no idea how you would do an OR search, it seems to default to AND which results in no results being found when you try to get funky with a query. XStreet used to have great documentation about advanced search, which can still be viewed here. However that’s not relevant to the new SL Marketplace and those tricks won’t all work there. However it does exemplify why boolean searches are useful.
However the fundamental issue with the SL Marketplace search is functionality, helping people include and exclude, helping people easily narrow down their results. This would take a lot of work for Linden Lab to get right, piddling around with relevancy and whether items of a certain value should be more relevant will not help the customer, having demos, different colours and abandoned content clutter the results up less, will help the end user.
Better policing of the SL Marketplace and more proactive clamping down on keyword abuse would also help …. so that’s functionality and policy enforcement that should be the priority, rather than funky formulas.
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