SL Search

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Contents

See Also

Objectives

  • Improve search in Second Life

Summary

We’re doing incremental development work on the Search functionality in Second Life, that includes some changes to both the viewer and back end services. This work will be spread across several development milestones ("M0", "M1", "M2"), and some parts will be released before others.

The goal of this first phase of search improvements will be to improve the relevance of search results - i.e. to make it easier for residents to find what they are looking for.

Many technical and logistical details are still being worked out.

Deliverables

Initially we'll be doing a replacement of what is now the somewhat underused "All" tab of the Search floater in the viewer. The rest of the Search floater will remain unchanged, both in terms of the viewer and the service, so searches on a particular type (e.g. Classifieds, People) will be completely unaffected.

Part of the work includes updated options to give residents more control over what information about their groups, regions, and profile is present in search results. These options will be deployed in advance of the new search mechanism going live, to give residents plenty of time to opt-out of any new settings based on privacy concerns.

Milestone 0

Viewer

  • [M0] Updated options in the viewer for controlling how group, profile, region, parcel and object information is included in searches.
    • NOTE: We plan to release a viewer with these options before the rest of the changes are released, to give residents plenty of time to adjust preferences.

Milestone 1

Viewer

  • [M1] Add an always-present search query box in the upper right of the viewer window (similar to the search box present in contemporary Web browsers)
  • [M1] Replace the current (somewhat inaccurate) meters in the upper right with a floater that displays more useful status and diagnostics
  • [M1] Update the "All" search tab to retrieve results list via HTTP by calling a new service (results are displayed as embedded HTML)

Service (back end)

  • [M1] Replace current "All" search query implementation (which just does multi-table queries against MySQL) with a relevance-based full text indexing mechanism. Type-specific search tabs are unchanged.
  • [M1] The search index is populated by indexing a static HTML representation, created by crawling the grid on a regular basis.
  • [M1] The static HTML representation includes resident profiles, regions, parcels (including objects), groups, classifieds,
  • [M1] The crawling mechanism respects privacy flags (both existing and updated options mentioned above), and will restrict what information is indexed based on resident preferences.

Milestone 2

  • Incorporate "Showcase" into the client
  • Create "Events with people going on now"
  • Move Places/Groups search to Search Appliance to reduce load and reliance on MySQL FULLTEXT search
  • Move Classifieds search to Search Appliance to reduce load
  • Move Land-for-sale search to Search Appliance

Future

  • [FUTURE] We plan to improve the UI for viewing search results to be more relevant to finding things. For example, the resident profile UI is more optimized for editing and interacting with the resident than quick searches.
  • [FUTURE] Search on the secondlife.com web site will be updated to access the new search mechanism.
  • [FUTURE] Based on feedback from residents, we will consider extending this search mechanism to cover the other parts of the Search UI.
Retrieved from "http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SL_Search"
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