Linden Lab yesterday blogged; Introducing Marketplace Search Beta :
We’re pleased to share that improvements to the existing Marketplace search functionality are now available through Marketplace Search Beta. We’ve made infrastructure changes to improve the relevance of search results – making it easier for you to find what you’re looking for! We have also made changes for search to scale better as more content and categories are added to the Marketplace – and that means the newest creations and additions are at your fingertips.
Search in Second Life, be it inworld or on The Marketplace, will always be a bone of contention. There are many reasons for this, a lot of them human. For example items may not be listed with keywords people are using as a search term for those sort of items. People may act in an unscrupulous fashion and use strategies that poison the well in the hope of people stumbling across their listing and the search engine itself may not contain enough tools to help people refine their search terms to find that special item. There’s only so much Linden Lab or any other search provider can do to mitigate these sort of circumstances.
However with the launch of Marketplace Search Beta Linden Lab are trying to provide an improved search experience for merchants and customers. Therefore they need feedback and they are seeking feedback in a couple of locations.
One place is the Jira, which is an avenue if you want to report a bug. However many people find the Jira a tad cumbersome, shall we say, so another location where feedback can be left is on the official forum and this is a very useful forum where some questions may well be answered, indeed one question has already been answered. Some people have observed that search results are slow on Marketplace Search Beta, Grumpity Linden has already provided an answer on that score :
This may seem counterintuitive, but Beta Search will be slow at first because it’s not getting enough traffic. The web servers spin down if they’re not getting requests. The speed in beta is not representative of what you will see once it’s in production.
This is good information to take forward, the more traffic that Marketplace Search Beta gets, the better it should perform in terms of the speed of returning results.
However please pay close attention to the fact that this is a beta search Linden Lab have unleashed, the blog post points out that it’s not yet a fully polished final version :
We are still working on an important feature, which will allow you to exclude keywords (such as “demo”) from your search – but want to get this into your hands now and get your feedback!
Now some people may not even realise that you can exclude keywords from the current Marketplace search, because it’s not often mentioned. The way to do this is to add NOT followed by the keyword you want to exclude, for example : Medieval Armor NOT Lion.
If I perform that search on the current marketplace, I should exclude results that include the word “Lion”, however if I do that on Marketplace Search Beta, I get, no results at all. This would actually concern me quite a lot if this wasn’t a beta version at play. However, for the time being, I’ll wait until Linden Lab have added that feature before deciding how much I want to frown.
Search really does need boolean operators to help people refine their results. The current SL Marketplace doesn’t have them in all their glory and I’m not sure if the new one will have them in all their glory either.
One thing that you should notice with Marketplace Search Beta is that it starts providing you with suggestions as you type, this is a feature that can definitely be handy. Another thing to note is that the relevancy results between Marketplace Search Beta and the current Marketplace are likely to be very different. I have no idea why this is, but I’m sure some people will work it out.
For now, it’s important that people use the new Beta search and give Linden Lab constructive feedback.