You spin me right round baby right round

RL is incredibly busy, very stressful and taking up a lot of my time right now, when issues like this arise they put firmly into perspective that my complaints about Second Life are not that important, there's more to life than books you know (but not much more).  My thoughts are more with the National Health Service and my immediate RL family right now but, as things are hopefully improving there, I'm going to give you a bumper crop of two or maybe three blog posts in the next hour or so, which is actually rather soothing for me so neener neener.

Let's start with spin, because the spin machine has again been put on full cycle. Liana Linden's blog about search has had me rolling my eyes in despair, Liana tells us: Search in Viewer 2 - More than just a pretty face. I'm sorry, but when you put lipstick on a pig it's still a pig. Search and the camera controls are two of my pet peeves, they are also two of my most imporant resources. Prok called me despicable for saying that my day to day tasks are being hampered by the viewer and then saying I like the viewer, he has a point, but there's something about the new viewer I like and if it brings me new custom then overall it could be beneficial, however it's a big but and I don't like big buts! I don't want anti or pro Prok posts in the comments, Prok can't post here, but I thought I'd mention it, there's a fair point being made.

The problem I have with Liana's post is the incredible spin, the search in viewer 2.0 is not an improvement at this moment in time and to try and paint is as such is not helpful or beneficial, a blog post of "Hey it's the beta viewer and search is in the beta phase" would have been beneficial, but don't try and tell me things have been improved when they haven't been. I am not and never will be a fan of spin.

Land sales are severely hampered with this new search, anyone who is not operating a land buying bot must be finding this painfully annoying, I'd wager that most people who search for good deals won't be using the new viewer to find them because the new viewer makes finding the good deals so damn painful.

Then we have Events, Liana admits that they are a work in progress, which is fine, I don't mind that but it comes under the umbrella of Liana telling us search is improved, it simply is not. I want to browse events, not search for them and to be fair, in the comments Liana does say:

"The next iteration of Events in Viewer 2 Search will strive to combine the best of searching and browsing into one interface. And with the new web-based Search interface, we can iterate and refine much more frequently!"

Which is fine, right now you have to put a search term in to find events, events need to be browsable, it's a completely different kettle of fish to search and that's how events should be. Last night my residents organised some readings in a fantasy environment, they are very well received but how on earth will people find them when viewer 2.0 becomes more popular? They'd have to put in a search term for those readings and that is not an improvement.

They've also removed the Go button in Viewer 2.0, the Go button was an unheralded search improvement, it allows you to go directly to the item listed in search, this is damn useful when you've returned search results for a large parcel, now that improvement has been removed, sigh.

I have never been a fan of traffic, but as I understand Traffic I can apply a pinch of salt to some search results and liked the option of being able to return lots of results via the old places search and less via search all and then using the dropdown to filter for only places. This was handy but now, no matter what search I use the results per page are limited, this is not an improvement.

A blog post telling us search will improve would have been fine, but the spin, Linden Lab, please stop the spin, search in Viewer 2.0 is a work in progress and we can work together if we know where you're headed, but we're not in the improvement stage yet. Search in viewer 2.0 is currently a step backwards, I don't mind that as it's the beta viewer but please don't try and tell me search has been improved when it clearly hasn't.