The Search For Search Continues: SLBrowser's Press Release

The search for a good Second Life search continues, with three main contenders - [w:Linden Lab] itself, the Electric Sheep Company and - though quiet for a while - SLBrowser.com. To date, not one has been considered perfect - but recent changes by Linden Lab have raised the bar slightly.

While I don't really publish press releases anymore (almost everyone can have a blog here, so what's the point?), this press release is getting published because it is of interest to everyone who uses Second Life. This is for informational purposes; I am in no way affiliated with SLBrowser (other than being a user). I do expect I'll be writing about Search and virtual worlds within the next week, but in the interim - this is what SLBrowser, now more formally under Metaverse Ink, has to say:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Announcing SLBrowser 2.5 for Full-Text In-World Search of Second Life.

CONTACT:
Felix Wakmann and Diva Canto

Neptune (15,215,27)
http://slbrowser.com

Nov. 1, 2007 SLBrowser Headquarters, Neptune - SLBrowser is an in-world browser that provides quick and easy access to full-text search of Second Life products, places, and information. SLBrowser 2.5 improves the previous version by introducing the automatic listing of products in vendors, as well as the collection of rich textual information available in notecards. SLBrowser searches over 2 million products and 230,000+ places from almost 15,000 sims in Second Life.

SLBrowser is a significant improvement over the current built-in search capabilities of Second Life, as well as over the new SL search currently under development by Linden Lab:
- listing is automatic and *free* -- no charge on product or parcel listings
- it allows search for millions of individual products
- it shows relevant images
- it supports the listing of products in vendors
- it includes information in notecards
- in supports tags such as price: area: region: and others
- its relevance method is neither traffic nor link-based, but common-sense based

Additionally to providing the best search service in SL, SLBrowser is leading the development of methods to control information collection bots.

** WHERE TO GET IT AND HOW TO USE IT

SLBrowser is available within Second Life through a Head-Mounted Display (HUD). The SLBrowser HUD is available from [the main SLUrl above], kiosks around Second Life, and from SLExchange, for free. To use it, simply wear it and then search at any time by writing a chat line starting with a question mark, as in " ?diamond necklace ". The results include a short description, a link to a map location, an image if available, and links to related information.

** WHAT'S INCLUDED IN SLBROWSER SEARCH?

Objects on sale, pay objects, products sold through vendors, land parcels, sims, and notecards given to visitors are all included, after filtering for privacy and public interest.

** WHAT'S NOT INCLUDED IN SLBROWSER SEARCH?

Residents profiles, groups, and events are not included. Linden Lab is already doing a good job at making this information available.

** ADDING OR REMOVING INFORMATION

To enable land owners to publish additional information or to control information about their land, SLBrowser is promoting an open protocol for robot interaction, the Robot Information/Control Protocol (RICP). In addition to the default information collection, SLBrowser provides sample scripts that handle common tasks: disallowing information collection, publishing additional information, and additional product listings. This enables store owners to publish product information for products sold through scripted multi-product vendors. The scripts available cover a large number of vendors in SL, including JEVN. The scripts can be easily configured to work with other kinds of vendors. For more information, visit the scripts page at http://slbrowser.com

** RANKING (or how is the order of search results determined?)

Order is determined by relevance of the results with respect to the search terms. The specific method we are using to measure relevance is quite different from SL's current and planned search. In the current SL search, relevance of places is measured by the traffic on the parcel, and relevance of classifieds is measured by the amount of money advertisers pay to Linden Lab. Traffic has been abused to the point of making it meaningless, and relevance-by-pay-check benefits those with more resources, in deteriment of those with less. In the planned SL search, according to the public description, relevance comes from Google's text analysis and page rank algorithm performed on a graph involving people's top picks, groups, parcels, landmarks, and classifieds. We suspect residents will soon find ways to cheat that too...

Our measure of relevance is neither one of those. We rely on the type and structure of the information, which allows us to make several inferences in order to establish relevance with respect to the search terms. Additionally, we measure actual inworld occurrences of objects in order to rank products and their creators. The order of search results is therefore a combination of word occurrences and their positions, the type of the entity (product vs place vs notecard, etc.), the quality of the information available, and the popularity of the entities and their creators measured through actual inworld occurrences.

Our ranking method automatically ensures a good balance between genericity and specificity. If you search for something specific like ?red silk dress, you will see mostly individual products -- red silk dresses. If you search for something vague like ?dress, you will see a lot of stores in the search results; the individual dresses will still be shown, but they rank lower than the stores.

This is just the beginning! Our mission is to develop the best search technology for virtual worlds; we continue to improve our heuristics for ranking so that you get the best matches for what you are looking for.

** SLBROWSER AND INFORMATION COLLECTION

SLBrowser makes some default assumptions about what is of public interest and what isn't. You are able to override those assumptions. Here are the default assumptions:

- Land parcels default to being listed, unless they are marked as Residential AND they are not for sale AND they are not marked for SL's search. In other words, if you have a virtual home that you consider private, simply mark it as Residential and don't list it in SL's search.

- Objects marked for sale by Contents and by Copy default to being listed; objects for sale by Original and objects not for sale default to not being listed.

- Further privacy filtering for objects on sale is done at the sim level. We automatically identify commercial sims, and we differentiate them from all other sims (residential, games, etc.). In commercial sims, all objects marked for sale, according to the rule above, are listed. For all non-commercial sims, all objects are ignored. This method filters out tens of thousands of privately-owned objects that are accidentally marked for sale.

** OVERRIDING THE DEFAULT ASSUMPTIONS

At any time, you can override our assumptions in three ways:

(1) you can ban SLBrowser bots from your sim. Note that the banning must happen at the sim level, so that the bot doesn't even get in. We don't recommend this method, because it depends on specific names of bots. Since we may change or add more bots in the future, you will have to make an effort to keep informed about the names of our bots.

(2) our recommended method is to place a Robot Control script in an object in your parcel. This open source script is available at
http://slbrowser.com
This very simple script is in all similar to the Web's robots.txt protocol. Please read the header to learn how to use it.

(3) if none of the above methods work for you, please contact us, and we will promptly list/de-list your products and/or parcels.

** SLBROWSER AND PRIVACY OF SEARCHERS

SLBrowser does not keep any record of searchers' names. While a log of searches is maintained for technical purposes, names are anonimized into numbers in a way that it is impossible to recover the original names, even for us. This is an important step towards preserving privacy, and constitutes a major improvement over the practices of existing search engines.

------------ Official Press Release distributed to the media -------------

Nov. 1, 2007, SLBrowser Headquarters, Neptune – Metaverse Ink announced the release of version 2.5 of SLBrowser, the search engine for Second Life. SLBrowser is pioneering a new generation of search engines for the metaverse, or immersive 3D virtual universe. This innovative system enables quick and easy search of over 2 million virtual objects in Second Life, including products, places, and information.

SLBrowser uses advanced automated robots to crawl the Second Life grid and collect information about objects of public interest including permanent structures, products for sale, and hyperlinked documents. The robots use advanced heuristics to locate and index as many objects as possible. Version 2.5 of SLBrowser can now search objects that are embedded in automated vending systems, which have previously been inaccessible. To achieve this goal, SLBrowser is proposing its Robot Information/Control Protocol (RICP) as an open standard for controlling the interaction between robots and any information in the metaverse.

The SLBrowser system is designed to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible. This is achieved through the use of advanced technology that excludes information about uninteresting objects from search results and prioritizes placement based on the type and structure of object information as well as the frequency of occurrences of copies of the objects in Second Life.

The system offers users the unique ability to search for products by attributes such as price, area and region. This makes it easier for users to find objects that must closely meet the user’s requirements. In addition, the system automatically scans each object for relevant pictures and displays those pictures as part of the search results, enabling the user to see the objects prior to making a selection.

The SLBrowser system uses a sophisticated set of automatic and manual settings to protect the privacy of Second Life citizens. By default, only objects on sale, pay objects, products sold through vendors, land parcels, sims, and notecards are included in search results. Citizens can easily override these defaults to include additional items or exclude items that are normally included.

SLBrowser is available for free within Second Life at Neptune coordinates 9/233/27, on SLExchange, and at kiosks around Second Life. Search is performed through a heads-up display (HUD). To use SLBrowser, simply wear it and then search at any time by writing a chat line starting with a question mark, as in "?diamond necklace". The results include a short description, a link to a map location, an image if available, and links to related information.

ABOUT SLBROWSER

SLBrowser is the first and only independent search engine in SL, and results from a collaboration between two Second Life residents. Professor Crista Lopes (aka Diva Canto) is a member of the faculty of the Donald Bren School of Computer Sciences at the Univeristy of California, Irvine. She has over 15 years of experience in software research and education, with an emphasis on pervasive computing and programming language design. SLBrowser is her second large-scale search engine. William Cook (aka Felix Wakmann) is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, Austin. He is an entrepreneur, software developer, educator, researcher, expert in object-oriented programming and databases.