I went to a Linden user group meeting last night where Thor, Brooke and Sea spoke about advertising on Second Life websites and inworld. One area of concern for me has been why classifieds have been cut from 512 (or in some cases 1,024) characters, to a measly 256, as explained on the Jira in STORM-577. Sea Linden actually provided an answer that made sense.
The reason is keyword stemming, which GSA introduced and it basically meant that some adverts were holding the top spots in lots of different categories because of stemming, therefore limiting the amount of characters means less stemming and more chance of lower priced classifieds scoring well in certain areas, Sea also explained that she has engaged in a lot of un-stemming. Stemming basically means people can get more words for their buck, which in turn hampers others.
The answer of course still leaves some frustrations and means that writing human readable adverts is troublesome, but it is an explanation that leads us to a base to try and find ways to improve the classified system.
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