Without wanting to game the system, I’m puzzled about the Group Search feature in Second Life.
We have a group, Nature, with 400 odd members. It used to be the top result when using the in-world group search for “Nature” and in the top 5 or so when searching for “science”.
I last noticed a few weeks ago that when searching for Nature that we now appear on p3! I wouldn’t mind, but the majority of the groups above us have hardly any members and even less relevance to science/nature. I see that we are not the only victims: the “science” search is now hit and miss, the Science Center is way down the list, lots of relevant results have disappeared entirely and all sorts of odd groups have appeared above them.
I’ve submitted a ticket (via concierge) asking about this, but typically have received precisely no response whatsoever a fortnight later. So two questions:
1. Any idea why the rankings have suddenly changed?
2. Has anyone ever received a response to a help request to LL?
Well, I’ve not played with SL groups, but it sounds like there’s some kind of time-based element to the algorithm. Maybe it’s measuring ‘groups with the most new members over the past x weeks’. In that case, although you have more absolute members, the smaller groups might have attracted more newbies over the time frame.
We do something like this on the NN groups front page. It’s not always ideal, but it does stop the same old groups hogging the limelight. Seems a bit odd for a search-based set of results, though.
You can re-sort the search results by the number of members by clicking on the header of that column. I’m also perplexed by the default order. Maybe it’s just random?
Troy, that puzzles me even more, actually – you can sort by number of members, but only sort within the results already on that page. So we (with 400 members) are on p3, therefore, if we sort p1, we still don’t appear till page 3, even though we would actually be in the top few. It seems a really bizarre way of doing things.