I found it at the obvious place on their site (after a couple of guesses), and it uses the same URL structure as Google after that, making searches easy.
Having poked around with it, I have noticed the following – based on the incomplete version that I found on their site:
- It looks good
- Classifieds are integrated neatly into the system
- A good chunk of the data is hosted on Amazon S3 – profiles, events, places, top traffic sites, etc.
- The TG and MG are in separate S3 buckets
- It appears to use new secondlife:// features – specifically, secondlife://app/event/*/about, secondlife://app/classified/*, secondlife://app/agent/*/about. Visiting these with the RC client open made it crash. That said, clicking most buttons made it crash, so that’s not saying much.
- Teen Grid and Main Grid results are not separated. I assume that this will change, given the separation of their data.
- It searches wiki.secondlife.com.
- A good deal of the data isn’t on S3 yet, so many links just tell you the key couldn’t be found.
- Main Grid profiles default to visible, but Teen Grid profiles default to hidden.
- Parcels have a list of searchable objects on them along with their prices, arranged in alphabetical order. Their parcel image is also visible.
- Boolean operators such as “NOT” work as expected.
- The search does not apply to the owner of something – e.g. a search for “Alex NOT Harbinger” still returns things owned by Alex Harbinger.
- You can now grab limited resolution textures off the web at http://secondlife.com/app/image/texture-key/2 – this is used by the search to provide images.
- The popular places lists, which appear in search (but probably shouldn’t), show sandboxes that are hidden from popular places in the current system.
- Objects that aren’t for sale tend to appear in the object listings. Oops?
- Avatar names tend to be just “(waiting)”, although the profiles they link to are accurate. I have yet to find any marked as “(hippos)”, however.
Also, lots of people seem to have expensive objects called “Object” for sale. It’d be nice if those were filtered out. The information seems to be fairly up-to-date, but is definitely slower at updating than the in-world stuff.
Of course, this is presumably supposed to be unreleased, so it could all change at whatever time. Still fun to look through though. And it actually looks like it’s a significant improvement over what we have now, woo.
Just need some way of separating out the MG and TG results. I suspect that LL will achieve this by locking searches to one of the two buckets depending on which grid you use.
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Hi Katharine,
Kudos on the discovery.
I would love to get the “secret” search link by email if you don’t mind sending it. My own guesses weren’t lucky…
Thanks
Eh, might as well put it in here:
The start page is at http://secondlife.com/app/search/. Since it’s designed for use within the context of SL’s UI, it lacks an input bar. Thus, to search for things, visit http://secondlife.com/app/search/search?q=your+search+here.
It looks like NOT is actually broken now, which is odd. Hmm.
Reasoning behind my guesses: All web-based client services are at http://secondlife.com/app/. Since this was search, I first tried “http://secondlife.com/app/search”, which threw an error about not understanding my request. Throwing a slash on the end fixed this. Having found the start page, I guessed at how to search. Knowing it used the Google Search Appliance, I tried the same URLs as google. Which worked – although you get sent to a search_proxy.php when you click the forward/back buttons.
Also bear in mind that not all the data is up on S3 yet, so you’ll tend to hit dead links.
Thanks for the (early) feedback! The search team here at the lab is mulling over your comments as I type.
The new secondlife:// URLs will indeed be handled by an upcoming viewer release that embeds the new search functionality, but we should patch the current RC to make sure it doesn’t crash. (I thought we had, but it must have slipped through the cracks.)
Listing objects that are not for sale is intentional – not all searching is done just for shopping! Even when shopping, objects that aren’t for sale may provide context that helps you narrow down what you’re looking for.
The fact that many objects don’t have good names is a challenge we’re pondering future work. Filtering out “Object” is a great idea, but beyond that: how do we encourage residents to name their objects?
Having the names appear in search results will help in itself, as it will encourage content creators to name their objects so they are found. But we’re also pondering things like alternate viewer modalities that show more textual data as you wander around SL. We’d love feedback and suggestions.
While I realise that people search for non-shopping reasons, I (think) that the default was supposed to be not showing in search for objects not for sale, and showing for everything else. Since I suspect that by this time people had not had a chance to go about setting large numbers of objects to show in search, and for these changes to be indexed, this suggests something’s slightly broken there. Or have I just misunderstood? I think I noticed that a good chunk of these objects were actually payable objects (vendors and such). This could have just been me trying to see nonexistent patterns, however.
The best way to force people to name their objects: Leave the “Name” box blank when a prim is created, and have it refuse to unfocus the dialog until it’s named. This would, of course, trigger a flood of angry content creators who can’t deal with taking the extra second to name their prims – they could, of course, bypass this using an unofficial viewer that doesn’t bother to check. They may have a point, since they’ll be linked, but I tend to regret not naming individual prims in my more complex objects…
Other than that, just keep building features that are suboptimal when thrown against things like “Object”, “New Script”, “Snapshot”, etc.
As for “alternate viewer modalities”, I’m unclear on what this could involve – but interested none-the-less!
Writing this at 4am because I can’t sleep. Hope it’s coherent!
Joshua. I suggest a question mark next to the “show in search” checkbox with “Quality guidelines” to educate people in the same way Google has Webmaster Guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
If you tell people how best to achieve results they will pay more attention and relevance will be also improved.
You could provide the list of such high volume inefficient keywords as not recommended and include warnings against deceptive or manipulative behavior, such as landmark spamming, if understand correctly. And to enforce against landmark spam you may want to consider this: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-869
Also, on another important note. Are you aware of the significance behind the fact that you are now exposing virtually all mod/copy/transfer texture jpgs access via http using the UUID key? And by exposing, I mean especially that you have no anti-leeching protection. I am just wondering whether it it intended or an omission to be corrected.
If it going to be open as it is now, I could actually be useful for third party web linkage to our own texture inventory for organizational purpose, but it can also be a content protection issue. I would love to know what’s your official stand on that one.
Eh. It’s not exposed as such. You can only get them up to 240 pixels wide – hardly “exposure” any more significant than what we had in the online “friends online” before.
If you want an easy way to grab any texture, try typing this into the address bar while logged into AjaxLife:
javascript:new AjaxLife.InventoryDialogs.Texture('00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001','My Texture');(Yes, there is a texture with that key)
From there you can right click and save as. I’m working on that, but it’s really a rather pointless game to play. The URLs are predictable and obvious too, right now. You can grab over 800 textures without even having to log in, since they’re cached. Yes, I can obfuscate URLs, hide images behind canvases, etc. But that is messy and doesn’t solve the core problem anyway.
Good valid points Katharine. I am mostly curious whether Linden Lab will allow third parties to display such textures on their own sites or have an anti-leeching policy there.
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3072
There’s a known bug discovered by the Sheep about which Joshua seems sadly unaware, which makes non-transferrable items once sold still flag as “for sale” and therefore forcibly makes them appear in SEARCH.
And many people don’t realize items they casually set to sale for all kinds of reasons not intended to mean they are PUBLICLY for sale are now going to show up.
It’s just amazingly inconsiderate of the Lindens not to mitigate this with a public announcement warning people to take things out of search — or fix the box before releasing it.
I keep trying to log into ajaxlife.net but it keeps telling me to turn off my caps lock key. I have even disabled my caps lock key and it still does not let me sign on. Can you tell me how to fix this issue?
Thanks