16 sqm text documents

16 sqm words

People’s creative solutions for overcoming technical limitations and for gaming the systems to their advantage always surprise me. The whole idea of camping (“earn money while sitting/standing here”), is in part a consequence of Linden Lab’s built-in search ranking the results based on traffic. Clever people thought “Let’s pay people to be here, so that we climb up the ranks!” Camping is an emergent activity and it ended up being a major attraction of SL. My step son camps for hours while playing other games on the computer.

I recently found yet another clever solution for a feature of SL that can be limiting. First let me describe the limitation. The limitation is that while SL is great for creating 3D content, it sucks at capturing plain old 1D text and 2D pictures. You build a fantastic virtual village with great shops and products, you want to list them in Linden Lab’s search-in-places, and then you have only 128 bytes to describe your creation. 128 bytes is about the size of this sentence that I’m artificially extending so that it uses exactly 128 characters. There. After you’ve done all that amazing work, you probably want to say a lot more, and preferably in several languages.

OK, the first approach is to divide the sim into parcels corresponding to the different stores and points of interest. That way you have 128 bytes to describe each one, and you can list them all in search-in-places for L$3o/week each. That’s better if you can afford it. But for some clever people that’s still not enough. They go on sub-dividing the space into the smallest possible units (16 sqm), using each of those little squares essentially as word-holders, text documents, for search-in-places. The picture above shows one of those. That particular square is about DUNGEON stuff, and the description is (hey, googlebot don’t index this, please) “Adult Free Sex Nude Beach & Orgy Room – free sex girls pussy cock orgy porn escort sexroom sexbed bdsm fuck cum bukkake”. Right next to it, there’s the DISCO square: “deutschland germany tanzen deutsch werbung treffpunkt disco party club dance shop rent disco camping events contests sex girls”. There are several more: FETISH, ESCORT, BONDAGE, SHOES,… That sim has 137 parcels, 133 of which are 16 sqm text documents. :-)

2 replies on “16 sqm text documents”

  1. deni morigi says:

    I had a kind of disappointment with using camping on my store parcel to increase traffic. At one time I had 4 camping units (the “work/job” kind, window washing, mopping, etc.) and a money tree. My small store was getting around 5000 traffic. I know this isn’t unique visits but some other kind of figure, but even so it is a high number for a small store and new designer. However, I had zero increase in sales. I did this camping for about 2 weeks I think. Additionally, the campers leeched a ton of lindens off of myself and partner, much more than we had anticipated. Even though the camping units have limits inside of them, the ones we used didn’t have any way to stop the same camper from simply resetting the unit after they had reached the max L limit. This was a learning experience for sure. I think the worst thing though was when my partner and I decided to get rid of the campers a few of them became belligerent and we had to ban them from the land. I can’t believe someone would have the nerve to become angry that we had stopped the free money flow and cause a stink, but they did.

    I know traffic is important to determining search result ranking, but what I took from this is it didn’t matter how high my traffic was if that traffic wasn’t what — (I think in marketing speak) is called “qualified visitors” (meaning paying customers). Sure it gave me a higher search result ranking, but as a small designer I still had the same challenge of competing with the bigger, more established names. This challenge is something that I do not think any kind of traffic tweaking can overcome — the only thing that is going to help that over time is to build a name for myself and make quality products. So, more than traffic, word of mouth and reputation I think would be a great enhancement to your search algorithm if there was such a way to fairly measure that? I suppose you could crawl the web for mentions in blogs or something but I imagine that is hardware/data intensive, not to mention it would be hard to gauge “fairness.” But it is interesting to think about! :)

    With that on my mind, I am really pleased to see your search engine that has bot avs go around and index items. The product search is awesome and I’m really impressed with what you’ve done. I am going to get the HUD and check it out in-world! Thank you for working on such a useful and cool tool for SL. Deni Morigi

  2. Diva Canto says:

    Sorry for the late reply — if you’re even reading this! I hadn’t realized there were comments waiting for my approval — duh! I guess I trust technology too much to warn me of stuff I have to do!

    Anyway, you are absolutely right. Traffic is a very poor measure of relevance. The holy graal of good search is to be able get at that elusive concept of “reputation”, which is a really difficult thing to define, to build, and even more difficult to measure. This is more important for virtual worlds than for the Web, because virtual worlds are inherently social.

    We have a very important element of reputation at the core of our ranking; its presence in our ranking formula has a strong impact in the ordering of the results. I’m afraid I can’t tell the specifics, but I can tell you that we do not use traffic at all to rank the results. We know about camping and bots well enough to know how easy it is to fake traffic.

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