Gaming search results - the unwisdom of crowds

Is there anything people can't or won't game if they see an ounce of profit and know what the rules are, or if they can work them out?

Take a glance at the image above (click for a larger version). That's the Skin Oasis in Second Life, specifically here, hidden below a small pond. Traffic (even though almost nobody understands how it works) is still a factor in search results – but in the new search system so are Picks in avatar profiles – and of course, places with lots of green dots on the map interest people more than places with fewer. This sim seems to be gamed all three ways for search-results.

There seems to be about 60 avatars in the hidey-hole beneath the pond. Every one of them has B&B Skins in their Picks (at least once, and as many as ten times). They also seem to win pretty much all of the L$1 prizes given out by the B&B Customer Rewards Orb – so if you're turning up for that, don't bother.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with this from a business standpoint – except of course that it's really easy to set up with a few minutes of python scripting, so there's the potential for an arms-race of sorts. A few minutes' work and you too could have a bunch of bots gaming your location's search results. Once enough businesses are doing that – the search system becomes useless to people trying to find your products, and you're back to the same luck-of-the-draw basis as if you hadn't put any effort in at all.

We don't like the notion at all. It seems cheap, tawdry, dishonest, exploitative of would-be customers, and a waste of resources. In RL, you'd call them shills. In google-terms, they're the equivalent of 60 fake blogs linking back to your site for the purposes of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Not that it actually really seems to work. B&B only ranks about 39th on the search for the keyword skins.

[via Grid Expectations]

We've contacted the listed owner of B&B to ask more about the reasoning and motivations of the setup.