The Lindens struck again. The announced today that changes will take place on Wednesday in the Search tool. Among their measures, they decided to remove classifieds from the Search All results, limiting the appearance of classifieds to the Classifieds tab. They also decided to remove events held on a parcel from the relevance criteria of results.
While the first move is rather useful, the second is a dumb one. By removing events held by active users in their clubs, stores or whatever else in Second Life, the Lindens are protecting the weight of two criteria that are dear to... their revenue and their statistics.
Think of it: without criteria such as events to sort search results, pure traffic numbers regain a good part of their weight. This means that people who buy Linden dollars to pay campers in order to boost their traffic numbers will be very happy. They will keep paying to fool the search engine.
The use of campers is extremely important to the Lindens. Without them, the number of hours spent in Second Life would go down just like the amounts of money spent in-world did in recent months. They couldn't brag about an increasing number of accounts and hours spent anymore.
In addition, it has an impact on the importance of classifieds. Paying large amounts of money to the Lindens for classifieds has always been an important way to boost your visibility in search results.
Finally, it exposes search queries to the impact of objects. With their names and descriptions, objects have an impact on the relevance of results. In an ideal world, nobody would spam the search engine by creating bogus objects filled with keywords. But one day, this will happen.
The only way to protect Second Life users against search engine spam is to have a complex set of search criteria and a reliable algorithm to handle them. So that relevance cannot be tricked with simple tools as traffic numbers are with camping.
Removing criteria that were introduced when the Google-based technology was introduced itself and that rewarded actual activity is a great way to protect the old ones that made so many of us complain that search in Second Life was simply broken.
Apparently, the Lindens don't care about what people think. Instead of tackling the issues that make business in SL unbearable, such as camping and bots, they just think of their own stats and numbers. It is sad.