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?)