SECOND LIVING

by Merlyn Bailly
copyright -- Sunday, 29 April 2007
Second Life

What ever happened to simple CATEGORIES?

Just because some trick like USER-ASSIGNED 'TAGS' (AKA keywords) is used on every damned BLOG on the freakin' Internet doesn't mean it is ALSO appropriate for use in databases. In fact, the same type of user-assigned KEYWORD SPAMMING has been forbidden on every large search engine on the net, including YAHOO, GOOGLE, ASK JEEVES, and on and on and on. Every single damn one of the major search sites BANS keyword spamming. Yet SLB and SLX allow it to continue, wasting user's time, frustrating people who would otherwise be able to find what they want and JUST FUCKING BUY IT, instead of getting totally disgusted with the waste of their time and logging off without buying ANYTHING. If I could log in to SL, I would spend as much time as necessary to track an item down in-world rather than buy a single damn thing from any website that uses merchant-assigned "tags". The only BARELY usable site is SLX, because their categories are still semi-functional, but they still allow merchants to tag items with completely unnecessary keywords, rendering item-specific searches unwieldy and ineffective. SLB is ridiculously unusable. Even their categories don't work well, tossing anything at you, even if the items don't belong in the damn category, even if the tag for that category hasn't been attached to an item.

I was going through the "building structures" category on SLX tonight, and noticed a fairly nice build by the same guy ( Amiryu Hosoi ) who did a prefab "MALIBU villa" I'd already bookmarked. This particular prefab is a little smaller, with a lower prim count. What I PARTICULARLY noticed on this listing, however, was the TAGS:

keywords: Real Estate, Realestate, Land, Rent, renting, Build, Building, buildings, Plan, Planning, Business, Project, Projects, Consultancy, commercial, shop, shops, design, mall, malls, kiosk, kiosks, palace, rez faux, villa, villas, condo, condos, house, houses, home, homes, cottage, cottages, prefab, prefabs, cabin, cabins, mansion, maisons, beach house, beachhouse, Buy land, Sel land, For sale, Property, Properties, Home builder, Home builders, Häuser, Hauser, Casa, Casa, Casas, Limited Edition, Exclusive

IT'S A FUCKING HOUSE. It's got not a fucking thing to do with "properties", "buy land", "sell land", or any of the other unnecessary tags included by this pseudo-Japanese halfwit. He's obviously COMPLETELY ignorant of how search engines use keywords (aka TAGS). You do NOT have to include plurals of every noun in your list. If you were searching GOOGLE for a book, the word BOOKS obviously INCLUDES THE WORD _BOOK_, so searching on BOOK will brink up all sites having the BOOK tag on them -- ergo, no plurals required.

Furthermore, this is the damned INTERNET -- the lingua franca of the 'net is ENGLISH. If you want to include the word for HOUSE in 50 fucking languages, it still won't help much - if yours is the only item tagged 'HAUS' in German, and some nitwit enters that word, it will give them very little choice of "hausen", and they will obviously start searching on a more useful word - HOUSE - which is likely to bring up much more in terms of what the buyer is looking for.

You also do not have to include every single word that goes through someone's mind when they're THINKING of buying a house for any reason, whether that is to use as a RENTAL PROPERTY on an ISLAND which is your current PROJECT... "house builder" isn't going to do much good, neither is "buy land" if what you're selling is just a damn house.

FURTHERMORE: Anything listed on SLX is, by definition, NOT 'exclusive', and NOT a 'limited edition'. Every time the item is sold, it's a fucking COPY. The copy is just a file, and unless the builder sells each copy of the item PERSONALLY, ONE BY ONE (and guarantees to only sell a limited number, AND signs/numbers each copy, including an 'authentication' notecard certifying that copy as number X-of-XX (like my silkscreen print that I bought a little over 25 years ago called "LONE CYPRESS", which is signed and numbered 234/600 -- the 234th copy of 600 printed, after which the plate or whatever was destroyed by the artist) so that this can be verified, it cannot possibly be either 'exclusive' or 'limited'. NOTHING listed on either SLX or SLB can possibly be sold as a limited edition or as an exclusive one-of-a-kind design because as long as the listing is online, anyone can buy a copy of the item.

The designer may be available for consultations, but spamming the tags on SLX with CONSULTANCY is completely unnecessary. No-one looking for a prefab house is going to be using that term, but buying a listing in the SL CLASSIFIEDS page might do a damn sight more good for the idiot designer's business than tag-spamming their listings on SLX. I think everyone with any sense in SL knows that almost everyone who creates in SL might be willing to freelance if the right project comes along. Just IM'ing the creator is all you have to do, and if someone is NOT looking for someone to do custom job, spamming that tag into your item tags in SL is more likely to make people think you're seriously stupid.

This particular prefab hardly fits ANY of the included tags; relevant and/or useful tags are bolded in black. I've greyed out all the irrelevant tags, and included specific reasons why that particular tag is irrelevant and/or unnecessary); in fact, very few of the keywords/tags used are relevant to this listing at all, and the two tags that would be MOST relevant to it are not included at all: RESIDENCE, RESIDENTIAL. Of 55 tags included in the SLX listing, only 5 are relevant to that item (6 if you include the variant of beach house - "beachhouse", one word instead of two).

keywords:

1. Real Estate -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
2. Realestate -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
3. Land -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
4. Rent -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
5. renting -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
6. Build -- Yeah, pretty obvious since I clicked on the category for BUILDING STRUCTURES... ergo, completely unnecessary.
7. Building -- what I just said
8. buildings -- unnecessary plural
9. Plan -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
10. Planning -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
11. Business -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
12. Project -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
13. Projects -- unnecessary plural
14. Consultancy -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
15. commercial-- not item-specific
16. shop-- not item-specific
17. shops -- unnecessary plural
18. design -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
19. mall-- not item-specific
20. malls-- not item-specific
21. kiosk-- not item-specific
22. kiosks-- not item-specific
23. palace-- not item-specific
24. rez faux
25. villa
26. villas -- unnecessary plural
27. condo-- not item-specific
28. condos -- unnecessary plural
29. house
30. houses -- unnecessary plural
31. home
32. homes -- unnecessary plural
33. cottage-- not item-specific
34. cottages -- unnecessary plural
35. prefab
36. prefabs -- unnecessary plural
37. cabin-- not item-specific
38. cabins -- unnecessary plural
39. mansion-- not item-specific
40. maisons -- unnecessary plural
41. beach house
42. beachhouse
43. Buy land-- not item-specific
44. Sel (sic) land -- tangential, stream-of-conciousness tag
45. For sale -- I'd say that's pretty obvious, wouldn't you?
46. Property-- not item-specific
47. Properties -- unnecessary plural
48. Home builder-- not item-specific
49. Home builders -- unnecessary plural
50. Häuser-- unnecessary foreign-language tag
51. Hauser-- unnecessary foreign-language tag
52. Casa-- unnecessary foreign-language tag
53. Casas-- unnecessary foreign-language tag
54. Limited Edition ----- BLATANTLY DECEPTIVE ADVERTISING
55. Exclusive ----- BLATANTLY DECEPTIVE ADVERTISING

When the lister/merchant is allowed to specify the tags applied to their items, the search results for people trying to ACTUALLY BUY ANYTHING FROM THE SITE can be badly skewed. If SLX and its merchants really want people to be able to FIND what they want, someone OTHER THAN THE MERCHANTS should be doing the tags for the items listed every day. Yes, it's alot of work -- someone has to go through the new items each and every single damn day and assign appropriate tags which will be effective in referring buyers to items which they are looking for.

THERE are two good tags for you: APPROPRIATE and EFFECTIVE. Remember those words.

This is why I hated the "new, improved" SLB when they updated the website -- I suddenly couldn't find anything I wanted, couldn't cruise categories easily without having completely irrelevant crap that I WASN'T looking for thrust into my face.

Just because I'm looking for FEMALE SKINS doesn't mean that I want every single item tagged with FEMALE included in my search results. I don't want FEMALE HAIR, I don't want FEMALE CLOTHING, or FEMALE JEWELRY, or FEMALE BODY PARTS, or FEMALE ANIMATION OVERRIDES or FEMALE GESTURES, or FEMALE SOUND BITES, or FEMALE ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN THE FUCKING FEMALE SKINS. Waste someone's time with everything else in the damned inventory tagged with 'FEMALE' and they'll log off your site and go buy it in a shop inworld.

The idea of how the search should work would be that all items which were tagged with BOTH those words would be included in the search results, and NOTHING ELSE. If an item was tagged with only ONE of the two search terms, that item would NOT be included in the results.

GOT IT, FLIPPER, YOU FUCKWIT AND ALL YOU OTHER SHEEPWITS? (You picked a truly unfortunate sci-fi reference, guys - sheep are some of the stupidest critters on the entire planet. I love the guy's writing, and his imaginative musings on technology were truly futuristic and very disturbing, but hardly appropriate to a business like SLB or to SL. If you're the "electric sheep", you need brain transplants and a good course in how search engines/terms are SUPPOSED to work EFFECTIVELY. )