The SL grid has been plagued by technical problems in the last week or so. The problems affect several functions, including LL’s search. But those problems don’t affect SLBrowser. Our search is always up even when LL’s is down, and even if you choose to access it from within SL using your web-on-the-profile.
Besides the obvious selling point here, there is a much more subtle, but important, architectural point that I want to make with this post. SLBrowser search is the living proof that several features of the metaverse not only don’t need to be centralized, but benefit tremendously from being provided by independent groups/companies. Search is one of those features, but there are a lot more. The good old principle of separation of concerns has served hardware and software design well for many decades.

As the community moves forward with virtual worlds, including efforts to design the next generation architecture of an SL-like scalable system, it is important to keep this principle mind.

Last night, Linden Lab announced its new search service available on their latest release candidate. We had been waiting for that to happen for some time now. Their new search is definitely a big improvement over their previous one. At the very least, they got rid of rank-by-traffic, which was essentially the opposite of relevance, and they gained Google’s powerful language processing capabilities. That, alone, makes the qualitative difference that we all see. But ranking for giving out meaningful results… boy, oh, boy. They have a long way to go.

Our SLBrowser engine is much closer to the right formula. We think people will like it if they could compare! But that’s where the train stops. Linden Lab doesn’t seem to be ready to accept third-party components over their data. We have a JIRA filled out asking for LL to open up their search button, and that has gone ignored. Technically, opening that up is trivial, especially now that their own search service works over http/html, just like SLBrowser.

So, while things stay the way they are, here are two ways by which you can access the SLBrowser search engine while being inworld:

• Use the SLBrowser HUD. You can get it from SLX or from the SLBrowser HQ in Neptune.

or — read this! —

• Use the embedded html viewer that is available on your avatar’s profile. Did you know about this? Most people don’t. Here’s how to do it: pull up your profile and choose the Web tab. There’s a text box in there, so type slbrowser.com and enter that. Voila! You are on our web site. From there you can enter your queries on the search box. Since that floatie cannot be resized, you’ll have to scroll down to see the results.

(hmm, I wonder why that floatie in particular can’t be resized… all others can. Could it be that LL discourages residents from using potential competitors on the web?)

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.