Day: March 2, 2023

March 2023 SL WUG meeting: MP search improvements

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

Update, March 8th: as per this official blog post, further fixes and improvements have been applied to the Marketplace search update.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, March 1st, 2023.

WUG meetings:

  • Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
  • Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
  • They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

Marketplace Search

The updates to the Marketplace implementation of ElasticSearch have been deployed, This means:

  • Merchant and store names won’t be included in product-specific searches anymore, increasing the number of relevant results.
  • The ability to do exact matches with quotes around a word or phrase.
  • Asterisk(*) wildcard searches.
  • Fuzzy matching will help with misspelled words and typos.
  • Search operators AND, OR, NOT will still work as before. (Note that they must be capitalised. Consult the tooltip next to keyword search for more information.).

Issues were encountered, such as the need to capitalise operators (as noted above), a bug with determining relevance, the result page displaying an inaccurate count of returns, etc. As per the official blog post, some of these have been addressed, and LL are watching the situation to address further issues as they occur.

In Brief

  • A general discussion on how the MP & search is used, e.g.:
    • How deep people go in scanning search return lists.
    • Do people use the MP & search to find specific products or general browsing (market research, curiosity, etc.)?
    • Do people use the MP as a means to find items then then purchase in-world or do they prefer to browse in-world and purchase via the MP?
    • The answers were broad-ranging and likely typical of a mix of merchants and consumers.
  • The question was asked about improving listing management for merchants, which generated numerous responses including:
    • Tags for listings, which when clicked will generate searches for items using the same tag.
    • An in-listing option for the owner of the listing to click on it to edit the listing directly.
    • Improvements to how discounts can be applied.
  • It was suggested that questions such as these should be put to users via the forums in order to generate broader feedback.
  • For details of these discussions, please refer to the video.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, April 5th, 2023. Venue and time per top of this summary.