Search in Second Life sucks. The current system relies on residents to list items with a title, category and description much like an old fashioned web directory. For places, shops, events, and land in general, the built in Search can and is, easily gamed. For products, it boils down to simple keyword Search on paid classifieds. Will this all change with the introduction of the Electric Sheep Company's search.sheeplabs.com? Almost certainly not, not in the short to medium term anyway but, the fledgling virtual Search engine is interesting, and may indeed produce useful results as time goes by and improvements are made.
How search.sheeplabs.com works
If you can get passed the fact that the Sheep decided not to give their beta Search engine it's own domain, making it look like a rather cheap, throwaway kind of venture, it's a pretty interesting project. It may even help take Search in the Metaverse to the next level.
A robot "crawls" non-private land , much as Googlebot crawls publicly accessible web pages, looking for objects marked "for sale", which means residents don't have to go submit their products to be included. The engine is Opt-Out, which means residents don't get a choice by default as to whether their products are listed, and have to go to quite some length to exlude themselves. It seems a Metaversal equivalent of the robots exclusion protocol. would be in order..
Search results are grouped by parcel (plot of land) and come complete with price, teleport link, creator and owner information. They do not appear to be ranked in any way, and at the time of writing I can't find any information on ranking so can only assume that there is none. More on that below.
The Problem with Search
Here's the deal. With the current system you can game land search by having people stay on your land "dancing". It's how land is ranked, by the traffic. It's a simple enough thing to do, and it's pretty much the norm. This means that the land search for certain categories is worse than useless, as you just can't trust the results to rank the best record, or even a mildly good one, first.
Will automated crawling make Search in Second Life any better? I can't see how. There appears to be no ranking variables involved in the engine, though even if there are any they'd not be any different to the very basic, easily gamed traffic stats residents see inworld using the default Search engine. Perhaps giving users the ability to order the results by price would prove interesting, at least untill some enterprising soul works out how to list something at $L1 and link it, or bait and switch it with a more expensive version. Possibly keyword density in descriptions and titles (if they use anything at all, it's this) would work? Well sure, but we've been there with the web right? All that happened was people started stuffing their pages , descriptions and titles with keywords. In fact, some morons still do this, really.
So where can it go? Is search.sheeplabs.com doomed to a bit of enthusiastic press and blog coverage and then a swift death through moronic keyword stuffing techniques last seen en masse in 1999? I don't think so. I think there's potential here, but ESC need to find a way to rank items that residents have less influence over, or perhaps allow residents to vote on the automated results, giving a human touch to the listings, moderated by the community. Perhaps inworld voting could used? Think Google Toolbar if you need a 2D reference.
Nothing is certain, but it WILL be interesting, and there is certainly the potential to take those raw results and turn them into something useful for everyone.
Via Mark Wallace