Massively^™

Back when the new in-world, Google-appliance-powered search for Second Life was put together, it had one glaring absence. While the search was entirely Web-based, there was no actual form on the Web. Recently that's changed, with Linden Lab quietly replacing the search field on most of their Web pages with an interface to search.secondlife.com in a recent update.

While there's no front page for the site, it's certainly trivial enough to locate the search forms intended for Web use. Essentially, it's Second Life's internal search bundled up for browsers, even the classified advertising down the right hand side of the results -- though unless you're willing to launch the Second Life viewer for each classified advert, they're not very usable.

All in all, however, it's a tremendous convenience if you can't run the Second Life viewer right away, but still want to dig for something or someone on the Second Life Agni grid, or if you want to look up the UUID for a user (yourself or someone else).

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Completely oblivious to the decoupling of traffic from search rankings in the new Second Life system, Traffic Injection has just started up a business to boost your traffic, promising variable amounts of dwell up to 150,000/day. This apparently seems to be achieved by mule avatars and (if we're reading this right) by spamming group IMs.

It isn't easy to tell, actually, since their Web-site (actually a blogger.com blog) is so poor on the grammar and spelling fronts, that much of it almost defies any attempt at comprehension whatsoever. English, we guess, isn't their first language -- which might be why they seem to be unaware that the basis for their business model is about to disappear (within the next week or two, most likely).

If you don't recognize the .nr on the end of their domain name, that is -- regrettably -- Nauru, the smallest nation in the world, and one with a grim history.

[Thanks Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Linden Lab have presented a prospective design for a system which allows users to flag search results for attention. The proposal was sent out for comment on the Second Life developers' mailing list yesterday.

The proposal describes a system where search results may be flagged by users as spam, mature-content, prohibited content or for consideration by the editorial team for the Showcase feature.

The 'Popular Places' list in Second Life's in-world search window is counting down towards closure and replacement. The category is often referred to as the 'Unpopular Places list' by many Second Life residents and has shown itself to be of limited usefulness.

The listing normally shows the top 20 parcels of land by Dwell (also called traffic, though that's a particularly misleading term for it). The Dwell algorithm doesn't actually reflect traffic and visitors in a useful way, but instead depends largely on what visitors did with their time when they weren't at the location (which might seem a little upside-down). In any case, campers and bots have been used to artificially pump that number, basically providing a cheaper alternative to using classified advertising at the risk of one's reputation.

Linden Lab is choosing to shuck both parts of this particular system, and replace them.

Sharp-eyed Wildefire Walcott has spotted (and we've spent the last few hours checking and verifying it across a number of accounts) that the profiles of Second Life accounts that have no payment information on file are excluded from the new Linden Lab search system.

More specifically, if they have publish-on-web checked, their profile is available through the web-service, but it certainly appears as if the search system does not index the contents of their profile (for results, search-weighting purposes, relevance or anything else).

In your Second Life profile there's a tab called Picks. That's where you put in the places you like the most, or the people you like best, if you care to list any at all.

With a limited number of places for Picks, you could be pretty sure that when you browsed someone's profile you'd find a mix of interesting places. Sometimes places that were visually attractive, spectacular or intriguing, or sometimes just because they held emotional or sentimental value to a person.

Not for much longer, it seems. Those spots can now be monetized.

Is there anything people can't or won't game if they see an ounce of profit and know what the rules are, or if they can work them out?

Take a glance at the image above (click for a larger version). That's the Skin Oasis in Second Life, specifically here, hidden below a small pond. Traffic (even though almost nobody understands how it works) is still a factor in search results - but in the new search system so are Picks in avatar profiles - and of course, places with lots of green dots on the map interest people more than places with fewer. This sim seems to be gamed all three ways for search-results.

Linden Lab have unveiled their new search with the availability of the first 1.18.5 release candidate. The search system doesn't appear to have a form where you can just browse away on the Web without getting into Second Life, so I've made one for you that you can use to check it out if you can't get inworld right now.

The new search system exposes a number of web-services where you can examine groups, sims, parcels, textures and more.

Linden Lab have just released a new release candidate view for Second Life, the first in the 1.18.5 series. This one primarily incorporates the new search system, about which you'll be hearing plenty more shortly. This release fixes Korean language support issues under Leopard, some appearance editing problems, fixes for lag-calculations outside the USA, and the source bundle has some assorted build fixes.

The viewer is available from the optional downloads page as usual, and we recommend the use of a download manager to grab it faster - without one, you're in for a bit of a wait.