The 'Popular Places' list in Second Life's in-world search window is counting down towards closure and replacement. The category is often referred to as the 'Unpopular Places list' by many Second Life residents and has shown itself to be of limited usefulness.
The listing normally shows the top 20 parcels of land by Dwell (also called traffic, though that's a particularly misleading term for it). The Dwell algorithm doesn't actually reflect traffic and visitors in a useful way, but instead depends largely on what visitors did with their time when they weren't at the location (which might seem a little upside-down). In any case, campers and bots have been used to artificially pump that number, basically providing a cheaper alternative to using classified advertising at the risk of one's reputation.
Linden Lab is choosing to shuck both parts of this particular system, and replace them.
The first part, the list itself, will be replaced with a web-based page of content chosen by an editorial group within Linden Lab's community team -- a move that will doubtless anger some who have long seen Linden Lab as endemically biased and partisan when it comes to favoring some users of the service and disfavoring others.
Essentially the new view will essentially be the Second Life Showcase reformatted for viewing within the viewer's Search window. This is expected in 2-3 weeks in release candidates (presumably Dazzle will be the official viewer by then), and in 6-7 weeks as a part of the official viewer.
As for the Dwell system (that's usually presented as 'traffic') -- Linden Lab had seemingly already settled on a new system some months ago where one avatar for one minute would provide one point of Dwell (a more comprehensible and reversible system than the current one), but now seems to be discarding that plan in favor of user-input through the in-world group 'LL Traffic Future'.
If you're a corporate marketer, that's definitely one group you'll probably want to participate in heavily.
As they say, "A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied."
