New search reveals new Second Life web-services

and here's what else is revealed -- the same problems that earlier came up with the Electric Sheep Company's Sheep Search scraped up by Grid Shepherd:

1. Even if you didn't wish for an object to "show in search" and never checked it off as "show in search," if it is checked off for sale, it's automatically defaulting to "show in search."

2. Even if an object is not transferable, and can't be sold, it is showing up in the search as an object for sale.

While these 2 problems *might* be fixed (number one should be eminently fixable -- it means just not coupling "for sale" and "show in search" and enabling people to OPT IN instead of OUT OUT) there are many other very disturbing things about this Search, which I predicted perfectly.

o The Search is now a box that is defaulted to one field for SEARCH ALL, which lumps together people, groups, land, etc. and produces a giant kasha.

o Because traffic is removed as the ordering function (because of the mistaken notion that you have to strip out traffic ordering to get rid of the problem of the first few gamed/camped sites), and is now reduced merely to one element of what orders search results, there's simply no rhyme or reason to the results. It's an amalgam (and a secret formula) of picks and clicks. There doesn't seem to be any logic to why some things are showing up first -- they don't have demonstrably more actual foot traffic or picks or anything.

And speaking of picks -- if you search for a certain location, among the search returns are the avatars who have put that location in their picks. That seems a bit intrusive but it was probably somebody's idea of "social media".

From digging around with it, there appear to be other search types available. Right now (through the viewer) only 'All' is available, but there appears to be one search type for each tab in the regular search window.

Presumably if this proves out, we'll see each of those separately available by the time 1.18.5 is released.

For example you can search for just places:
http://secondlife.com/app/search/search.php?hl=en&q=philip+linden&s=Places

or people:
http://secondlife.com/app/search/search.php?hl=en&q=philip+linden&s=People
(though the results seem overly broad since it's searching all profiles for references)

I haven't seen a key for group search yet.

If you have the UUID of a texture, you can access it freely via this interface just like you can render it freely on a prim (e.g., with llSetTexture) as many times as you like. However, "Copy Asset UUID" only works on assets for which you have full permissions in the first place.

Agreed. The point is that even before these web services were introduced, once you managed to get the UUID of a texture (using whatever means), you could use it freely.

Tateru, obviously there is more than just the grab-bag SEARCH ALL. That's not my point, as it wasn't the point in my critique of the OnRez viewers. Yes, you can drill down and find the other tabs.

The point is that many people will never go past the SEARCH ALL. That's one of the reasons so many geeks pronounce search as "broken". Now in SEARCH ALL it has all kinds of flakey things happening, like if you search under your name, it gives every single JIRA bug you've reported (!) before it will give something like your store -- it's insane.

The old search tabs are a hollow shell. You can get a search results from them, but click on any one of the results and note how the description is empty for the parcel -- they've stripped it out.

It's still early days for the new search system. remember, this is a bit of an improvement on the potential afforded by the originial Search engine provided within Second Life.

And there's room for improvement, I won't deny that. but give them some kudos for plunging into the job. writing search engines is a PhD thing.

I pointed these put a while back on my blog (http://blog.katharineberry.co.uk/2007/10/19/new-sl-search) - Judging by Joshua Linden's reply (which completely ignored the ability to do this), I wouldn't say LL are concerned about it. Given that you already need the key, and even then can only get limited resolution versions (unless they changed that), I'm not hugely worried.

can't use partial words for searching for avatars......