SEARCH WORKS! THE LINDENS *ARE* THE BOTS!
People flogging their search engines like Forseti over at the Electric Sheep remind me of private island dealers hawking their IHOP rentals by dumping on the mainland, calling it ugly, laggy, blight-filled, grief-ridden, etc. to drive people into buying their islands. In fact, the dirty little secret of a lot of these ugly spinning signs set to extortionist prices in Second Life is that they are advertising...island villas so they're creating the problem that they say they'll save you from!
Forseti and others with a lot of influence and visibility are saying that the search is "broken" or "lousy".
But...it's not. For those of us who live and work in SL, it's working great. Just fine, thank you! Don't fix it if it ain't broken! SEARCH PLACES, combined with TRAFFIC, which renders it meaningful, or CLASSIFIEDS, or GROUPS are how you sell stuff and find stuff to buy, and by God, the 264,346 people who spent more than $1 inworld last month (an unknown portion of those who logged on), for the staggering amount of something like $2 million US a day, some of which went to parcel directory fees for $L 2,144,190 and classified charges of $26,032,841 can't be wrong! They're paying for something *that works*. I know, because I run something like 20 classifieds a day, and spent something like $25 US per month in search fees, and that's how I rent my land and that's how people renting my land for stores manage to sell their stuff.
Need a flashlight? I'm not sure how Lordfly missed my tenant Tohru's store, where she includes "Flashlight" in her search words for her classifieds. Forseti needs an avatar radar? What, he didn't plug these words into search or classified and find the dozen gadget stores that sell them? He couldn't get on a group and ask his friendship card pals to give him the free Linden-made one everybody has somewhere?
Sure, search could work BETTER. I always said that, even 3 years ago. I couldn't find "little black dress" and tried to find someone help me make a yellow pages. I even got a group together to share information about businesses in the atoll continent and I'll never, ever forget how that meeting was griefed by Max Case, who hovered over it and mocked me and others. Apparently the prospect of people doing this manually, socially, in some text-based analog way infuriated him, because he felt he should scan the grid (and was already busy scanning the grid for all his little gadgets).
Oh, TRAFFIC is gamed, you say? Could you get your mind out of the gutter? Why are you looking at Popular Places with its bought positions? That's not the place to look for TRAFFIC. TRAFFIC combined with SEARCH yields pretty good stuff. Please. Type in men's hair. Do you find Here Comes Trouble with hits traffic-filled lot? Ok, chances are, those people have some passable men's hair. Did you find some store with 4 traffic that has some girl's hair shop who was born yesterday? Chances are, you will not p2p to her hair. And if you think HCT uses camp chairs, think again. I visited there just now and found 10 people browsing and testing stuff on posers. These are not people who need to use camp chairs. They use search ads and classifieds and they make good hair and people come buy it...using search. Full stop.
People who use Google in RL and think SL should become like Google don't even realize they don't use Google itself in RL the way they imagine people are supposed to use Google in SL. That's because tekkies are still ruling this discourse, and not anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists, philosophers, writers -- or even just ordinary people noticing stuff about the way people REALLY use technology instead of the way engineers IMAGINE they use it from their IMAGINED notion of it when they designed it. That gap between their design and its iteration; between their design and its implementation is one that tekkies are never, ever comfortable with admitting. But in a 3-D virtual streaming world, that kind of hubris gets shown up very quickly.
How do people really use Google? If I need a flashlight or a digital camera in SL, do I just type "flashlight" or "digital camera" into Google? Well, I could. But I might get some ridiculous site that has nothing to do with anything. So I try to plug in other stuff. I sit at Google and I ask my co-worker, hey, what's the name of that hardware store, you know, the one on First Avenue? No, that other one, closer to the deli? Or I type in a store name like "Sears" that I might have come to trust. Or I type my location. Or I browse based on hits. The socializing and the judgements and the manual, human additions to Google that people instinctively start making are things that people are now stripping out of their discussion of SL -- which is pretty silly, given that it's a very social world.
People network, socialize, make little trust circles. A lot of shopping in SL isn't really about finding the perfect kickass little black dress, it's buying your friend's little black dress because she's starting out and you want to support her. Or she bought your purse. Or someone recommended her. It's just not about some stark big mega search based on somebody's stark mega scrape and dump. It's about clicking on an avatar and looking at their picks. I'm not particularly thrilled that our world is like a medieval guild-village, a kind of big Renfair. I'm not thrilled that so much he-said/she-said goes into shopping, and it isn't an open society. But it would be foolish to pretend it's not like this. It is. And people have thrust themselves back into that village-like past, playing store and Renfair, because the real world, with its giant malls and vacant Google pages hasn't been satisfying to them. Forget that at your peril in Second Life if you wish to do business.
Whenever I talk to the metaversal myrmidons and the tekkies about the SEARCH they tell me with enormous impatience about something they couldn't find. Nine times out of ten, it's a *prop*. It's not something people really use inworld. It's something that the myrmidons are putting on a stage-set for their big clients who need a trade-show-like exhibit, a big build, a splashy event, a giant 3-D ad. I doubt Lordfly really needed a flashlight to dance with, to use in a role-play for a Nancy Drew detective show, or as a realistic police/fireman group in SL. He probably needed it to make some prop for a client. And maybe my tenant hadn't appeared yet and put her keyword in when he was looking, but I know I've had a flashlight in my inventory since forever, and so do many (of course, there's the rather pointed issue that you don't need a flashlight in a world where you can turn on the sun at will...)
People find what they need in THIS world, quickly, and pay bunches for it. Everybody's happy. They're making bank. My God, they spent a whopping US $2 million dollars yesterday. So...that's a search that is broken? Hello?!
So...how to make the search better? My concept is that we don't need outside third-parties who want to gather the data for their own commercial purposes, and show the callousness of the Sheep in not asking people's permission to scrape, and insisting stupidly on "opt-out" claiming that "opt-in" just fills their data coffers too slowly. (And...that's a problem? Because...why? If it's true what Forseti says about not doing this for commercial gain?)
Hiro Pendragon has raised the issue of resource draw and the problem of the categorical imperative -- everybody should get to have a bot, and then everybody will, all those obscene 16m2 lots will be used for that purpose if not flying bots. You have to wonder how these bots were able to fly over 7800 sims and not get noticed or shot-down or abuse-reported! But...the problem isn't whether everyone will get to use them and lag us all to death. The problem is that botting is a primitive and stupid way to cover the grid. It's done only because these outside third-parties are, well, outside third-parties.
The Lindens have a better way. The Lindens ARE the bot, that's why. I don't know the mechanics of this. But I know that Philip Linden, to know stuff like he's always spouting -- like "number of objects created in world" and whatnot does NOT have a bot out there scraping. Philip's entire THING is a BOT. How? Well, I'm assuming that any system that can return prims on autoreturn if not set to the group, such as to send me these seriously wordy and wonky notices like "Your object SLURL Maker has returned from Baileya 240, 27, 1 due to autoreturn" is also able to form a Data Base of All Things, to keep lists of all the stuff in SL. To rez it, render it, return it -- you need a search...somewhere. Don't you?
Erm...I think that Data Base of All Things is called...the asset server? Would that be correct? That is, the *Lindens* God Bless 'em! have a data base that has the names of stuff, whether it's for sale, where it's located, etc. The very ability for me to put a thing on for sale in the first place is a thingy recorded and recording in their dbase. Soooo.....they have it all "done" already, so to speak.
All that stuff these bots are roaming the grid furiously trying to snarf up is *already* in the Lindens laggy servers. Sooooo....let them make the search! Seriously. They'd be best at it, and would need the least resources to do it, would lag the thing the least, and also, would be the least likely to be serving any one commercial interest with it. Frankly, I don't care if they serve their OWN commercial interest as I'd trust them more than many others to be fair -- and that's, of course, relative.
In fact, the Lindens have shown signs for something like a year now that they were working on some kind of web thingy. All avatars and all land parcels already have checkboxes that say "publish to web" and "mark as mature". (Um, "opt-in" -- get it?!) Now, that SEARCH of theirs on the web (unlike the inworld SEARCH) is truly from hunger, that is DEFINITELY broken and is like the SEARCH PLACES on a very bad day when it is broken even by the Lindens' own admission.
Still, the same Boolean stuff that made the inworld SEARCH cook better could be applied, being on the web, it will be outside their laggy game, and they can even go stick it on those amazon.com servers they use for registration and log-on and they can even...gasp...get Google to do this. In fact, I'll bet that the form the big erm....."liquidity event" will be in, will be just that fashion -- selling not SL itself, its engine -- that will remain the Little Engine that Could at the Little Linden Lab -- but selling the world's search capacity for Google.
Now, Google, as I've already become famous for saying, is not a thing you have sex on or with. And frankly, I won't even embark on that side discussion about how two people jerking off at home with cartoons of themselves aren't really having sex, because frankly, the huge percentage of people doing this on SL happily belies any effort to try to undermine that emotional truth. They don't have sex reading Google pages. Even porn pictures found with Google aren't as compelling. No, the 3-D streaming world of SL is what they have sex in, and other avatars with, and that simply cannot be compared to a 2-D page. Sex is mainly in the mind anyway.
So what's the moral of this story? The Lindens need to get busy making a new search. I think Cory Linden had said four months ago at a town hall they were doing this, but you know, they get so distracted with other stuff, with attending game conferences all over, that they may need some ah...repurposing on this.
So they need to a) devise a policy about people's privacy regarding third-party grabbers and b) do their own SEARCH. THEIR search is already opt-in. THEY don't have to worry about populating it.
It's populated already.
Heh, Lordfly could make his own flashlight in any case :)
Putting aside the other topics, you're right about the main thing: It's Linden Lab who have the access at their fingertips, and who could make the best use of it. Everyone else is basically panning for data, while Linden Lab can actually mine the data.
On the other hand, if they can switch off "search" then it's one less thing for them to deal with.
I quite like search as it is now- for most consumer type searches (shoes, dresses etc) you maybe get a dozen obvious high traffic casino malls, but you then start to get the real stores, and you get a feeling for what traffic numbers seem right, how far down the list you'll go.
Personal recommendations are the best, but if we're looking at finding specific products, then browsing a site like SLB/SLEX makes more sense, because it's a list of stuff people are clearly selling, and it's been provided and categorised by the sellers.
Scraping a bunch of crap and spewing out some vague list of "stuff that's had a box ticked" seems awkward. If someone pulled the search places descriptions and offered a proper search of those, that would be cool. That someone would be the Lindens, ideally, because they wouldn't have to grind the sims with LSL or bots, endlessly scanning, recording, transmitting. It is kind of convoluted when the data is all at LL's fingertips.
Posted by: Ace Albion | April 16, 2007 at 06:36 AM
Second Life is a bot!
Posted by: Baba | April 16, 2007 at 11:15 AM
If you're going to fake being me, at least link to my blog.
Posted by: Baba | April 16, 2007 at 11:20 AM
It wouldn't bother me if the Lindens handled the search, but I have my doubts as to whether their (notoriously unreliable) servers are up to it. Searching a very large database is not as easy as it sounds, unfortunately, but if they did expose some part of that database to a trusted third party (eg. Google), that could work quite well.
A possible solution would be to use your idea of having a checkbox on each item to optionally make it searchable, then have Linden Labs expose that data to the search companies, Google or otherwise. It might even be beneficial to allow multiple companies (yes, even Sheep) to implement their own searches, if only because competition tends to encourage a higher level of quality.
One reason why many people (including me) think that Sheep's search engine would not work if it was opt-in is that many (most?) people simply do not know about it. You can't get a search engine up and running with only a tiny bit of data, and whereas the average noob would have no problem checking an extra box upon setting an item for sale, he is very unlikely to seek out and opt-in to a completely separate search engine that he's never even heard of.
Posted by: Sage Straaf | April 16, 2007 at 05:02 PM
It's not my "idea", Sage, the avatars and the land already have the check boxes "publish to web". The Lindens probably didn't think to put this option for every piece of plywood so as to avoid lots of noise and junk.
The question then comes: do we even NEED to have each individual object checkable? I mean, that's insane. Even every object for sale. What's needed is LAND where the stuff is for sale or the avatar, who can be contacted.
Just because many people don't know about something is no excuse to raid their land and grab all their information. Doing such stuff should be done with proper notice. If it were done in RL -- when it IS done in RL -- you scream bloody murder as a proper lefty. Why do you do so much less in this world, becoming a right-wing conformist and conservative?
The idea that companies have an eminent domain to grab stuff just because their search engines need to be populated really makes me gasp. Says who? Why? For what? How come?
I don't CARE if the Sheep don't have a search engine. It's their commercial interest, not mine. Having a better search is a public interest matter, but not one which they are equipped to handle properly, given their casual and cavalier attitude toward CopyBot (Cory Edo was busy testing it and trying to convince everyone it meant nothing; Christian W was too) and now this SearchBot which they are aggressively and insolently pushing.
The newbie can check off a box to sell something -- he does that already. He can also check off publish to web. The concept of "publish to web" is one easily inculcated in the population in the usual manner -- MOTD, blogs, community leaders, etc. It's already part of the avatar and land menus.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 16, 2007 at 05:09 PM
Sorry real Baba, I forgot I was signed in as you.
Anyways I was going to say this post sucks because it doesn't mention CopyBot at all, but Prok saved the day in the nick of time.
Posted by: Baba | April 16, 2007 at 05:42 PM
Perhaps, Prok, but I'd still like a usable search engine, no matter who makes it. I don't spend money on anything other than uploads, so I doubt I'll ever use it to find items to buy, but since I plan on selling things in the near future... well, it'd be awfully nice to have another way to direct people to my creations. As you said, people typically won't bother with some noob's store that was created yesterday, and that's all well and good, but what if you -are- that noob? I get the impression that it's very difficult to establish yourself when many will take one look at your traffic and go up to the next listing.
Posted by: Sage Straaf | April 16, 2007 at 05:47 PM
Baba, in fact the poor newbie DOES get a chance in this system. He can pay $30 and get into the first 100 or 200 easily enough if he can pick the right unique key words and have something interesting to offer.
He could also buy his way on to the classifieds. But that's why it's good that besides classifieds there is traffic, and not all traffic can be bought.
It's much more controlled and visible than a huge bag of clutter and junk that the Sheep are serving up.
It's also possible for the Lindens to put their search on their own web or on some other web servers.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 16, 2007 at 08:47 PM
That wasn't me. You know I don't care about newbies.
Posted by: Baba | April 16, 2007 at 08:54 PM
Love the TalkShoe podcast Prok. Gotta get one of those.. um, if I actually had a blog that is.
Posted by: Earnest Candour | April 17, 2007 at 05:32 AM