A major evolution of Second Life is making a few business owners nervous. Others, such as me, are rather sharpening their knives in anticipation.
Anyone who has downloaded the latest Release Candidate of Second Life - a test software download that previews future features - and has opened the search tool knows what I am talking about.
What's new? Relevance.
Yes, the R word that has been previously absent. Search results in Second Life have been traditionally ranked either by the traffic numbers on the land, or with the price paid for classifieds.
If the price of classifieds should stand for some purposes, the importance of traffic will take a bit of a hit with the introduction of relevance as a criteria to sort results. When this feature makes it to the standard software - it currently is in beta - people who offer exploring or shopping sites in Second Life will have to reexamine their options.
We all know it: the use of camping spots has been a big favorite for a few business owners. It helps them to boost their traffic by taking advantage of the weaknesses of traditional search results rankings. Without wiping them off the map, relevance will definitely add some fairness to the deal. It already shows in the Release Candidate client.
How many times did we have to rely on long searching and teleporting journeys to finally find a great place for clothing, houses or art? How many quality businesses have seen their sales undermined by lack of traffic because they do not use campers to boost their rankings?
Asking the question is providing an answer to it. Too many!
I fear nothing from a good relevance scrap. I want it! And I am not alone. If you have been around for months or years in Second Life, you know that most of your best landmarks haven't been found in the first results of the search tool. They came from serious efforts to find quality.
Of course, the people who presently favor throwing Linden dollars at campers instead of using decent marketing strategies will look for holes to exploit in the new search system. But as Google already does on the Web, Linden Lab can fight back by adjusting its algorithm.
Google cleaned the Web search mess. Linden Lab is cleaning the SL search mess.
And those who are nervous can only fear... their own irrelevance.