I logged into Second Life a couple of times recently with the idea of exploring and engaging in things I don’t usually. So I started with the Search window. It’s so amazingly hard to find a link to anything good, but this Search window makes it almost impossible to even just browse the list.
I may be wrong here, but Search is supposed to present organized lists of links, right? Isn’t that something that we’ve had for over fifteen years on the web? And somehow that’s beyond the capabilities of LL devs? You can’t navigate easily, the search basically doesn’t return expected results, and you can’t bookmark for later exploration without actually going there and making a landmark. It’s just phenomenally poor design and implementation.
I couldn’t find much with the search function, so I wandered through each of the dozen or so featured links and found a handful interesting but empty locations. Nothing truly engaging. I know there are people in SL doing fun things. I’ve been engaged in SL since 2003. But I can’t, despite my best efforts, actually find them. At that point, I ended up wandering through empty sims for an hour or so.
Essentially, there is no way to get to good content beyond word-of-mouth and shared landmarks. That is inexcusable this late in SL‘s life. We need a Google of SL, and then nobody will say there’s nothing to do in SL. They’ll say there’s too much.
you’re right about the continuing inadequacy of SL search — but this is perhaps inevitable as it has been developed within a philosophy of LL giving SL members what it thinks they need without losing control — competing search facilities are probably necessary for something more effective to evolve… and then we’re back to the open source problem lol
Is it even possible to build competing search facilities? And is that really the best way to go, by duplicating effort or worse? It only takes a few competent developers to re-design the search engine and its interface. LL should have done that years ago.