Second Life search upgrades in late January

It's always enlightening to hear from Frank Ambrose at Linden Lab. His posts about Second Life architecture, when they appear, are generally packed with information about upcoming plans, pending architecture changes and more. Clear, to the point and generally very few signs of spin (although a bit of distressing a tendency to type 'LAG' in all-caps). Overall, it's what we like to see more of.

In a similar vein, there's a notice from Liana Linden about some late-January upgrades to the Google appliances that handle much of Second Life's search infrastructure. There's a few additional benefits in the wings there, to be sure, and well laid-out.

The short version for the improvements includes further prejudicing search results against people who are packing parcel descriptions with keywords, better handling of 'stemming' (handling various variations of root words sensibly), and making multiple-word searches work better

At the heart of it though, those poor Google boxes seem to be getting shorted. Folks complain that Second Life search should behave more like Google does – when it's actually Google boxes that are doing the work. So, why is it that they don't seem to do so well?

Well, Google loves text. Lots and lots and lots of text. The more text the Google algorithms get, the better it does. Unfortunately, the amount of text that it actually gets to chew on in Second Life is quite small. Most of those text-fields max out smaller than the average paragraph length at Massively.

We can't find things as effectively because Google's algorithms can't find them as effectively; Google's algorithms can't find them as effectively because the users aren't able to provide those algorithms with the delicious textual treats that they hunger for; and users can't provide it because there just isn't enough space.

Maybe the Lab should let us link a parcel to a page on the Second Life Wiki, and let the Google search boxes digest the text from the wiki instead. Heck, it might even improve the Wiki usage statistics some, and reduce some of the load on the grid databases – quite aside from actually, you know, letting us find stuff more effectively.

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