Ladies and Gentlemen,

A number of people, we’re sure, are curious about what the future of Second411 may hold. Rest assured, these are exciting times for store owners and HUD users, as well as for us as the new developer. We will soon announce more details as to what our plans are for the improvement of Second411, making the best Second Life products search engine even better.

The goal is to provide Second Life residents with the best possible search experience, make it even easier and more fun to discover new products, and allow sellers to reach a larger audience in the ever so fast growing world of Second Life.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Hal9k Andalso for having created such a useful tool, and wish him the best of luck with his Fabjectory endeavor.

More will be revealed soon.

I’ve completed the sale of the service, thanks to all who bid for their interest.

The buyer wishes to remain undisclosed for the time being as they have their own strategy for moving ahead with the service.

On a personal note, I’d like to thank all of the shop owners who added their goods to the index and thank the residents of the greater SL community for their feedback and encouragement.

My new project (Fabjectory) has just sucked up all of my spare time and I’m looking for a good home for the Second411 service.

If you’re interested in purchasing the service, drop me a line at 330.329.8016 or email mike@fabjectory.com.

The basic stats for the service are:

- 5500 items listed (these are “fresh” as obviously spammy duplicates and old items get removed)
- 340 total itemboxes distributed (this is the total number of stores, including dupes and my initial loads of freebies, currently 78 active).
- One to Three hundred queries a day completed
- 4000 Search HUDs given out (100 in the last 3 days).
- MySQL/PHP Application
- Modular design to easily add other search services

If you need more specifics and/or technical details, please let me know.

Thanks,

Mike

I implemented some new scoring algorithms to help reduce the amount of duplicate entries people were seeing in the results. I’m going to be doing more and more to improve the quality of results now that things are about as stable as they can be with the SearchHUD and site.

(click for large version - 1.1 MB)

I’ve bought a full page ad in the next issue of SecondStyle magazine. Adri Saarinen (SL Publicist extraordinaire) came up with the ad concept which I fleshed out in Photoshop. All of the search results displayed in the background of the text are from real searches that people have done. I didn’t include any delimiters in them so they form all kinds of weird stream of conciousness phrases: “Pajama Outfit Ponygirl Hell” “Ghostbusters Script” “Roulette wheel breasts” As you may have guessed, this is the raw search data (emphasis on the “raw”). I contemplated editing the results, but found that 50% of the searches could conceivably be offensive to someone and figured it was better to do no editing and piss everyone off evenly than to play favorites.

Tags: SecondLife, Advertising, Censorship, Searching, SecondStyle

So, a couple times today the service has been returning “database unavailable” messages. As it turns out MySQL wasn’t stepping out behind my back like I first thought, but was instead being pummelled by some bastard of a comment spammer.

I have Akismet installed, but apparently the comments were coming so fast that it overwhelmed the sql server (we’re talking 1000+ comments submitted in less than a minute). This caused a series of issues which resulted in the sql server being found to be “otherwise indisposed” today.

Things should be back to normal and everyone can return to typing naughty words into the service and pretending to be shocked when they find results.

Tags: SecondLife, Comment spam, outage, system admin, akismet, naughty words

I couldn’t sleep last night, so instead of doing something sensible like drinking a glass of warm milk, relaxing and punching myself in the face until I passed out, I got to coding.

I got Yahoo! Search integration working in my experimental, unreleased HUD and would have gotten Google Search integration working as well except that the SourceForge repository was down and I couldn’t find a copy of NuSoap anywhere else.

While I certainly don’t feel qualified to make a blanket condemnation of a technology that I haven’t really gotten into, I do know that Amazon’s and Yahoo’s! REST interfaces to search were so easy to get working that I had one of those creepy: “No…it couldn’t be that easy” feelings when it worked for the first time. It was the programming equivalent to having tripped, fallen down a mountainside, over a bridge and then nailed a perfect landing into a passing cargo truck full of down pillows. Comparatively, SOAP feels like I haven’t even gotten up the mountainside yet. We will see.

Tags: Secondlife, Search, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, SOAP, REST

Thanks to the awesome set of Amazon Web Services (AWS), I’m very happy to announce that the latest version of the SearchHUD (version 1.0.6) now supports in-world searching of Amazon’s book index.

To use this feature, when doing a search with the SearchHUD, prefix your search terms with the operator “amazon:”.

example: “/411 amazon: SnowCrash”

Instead of teleporting you (like normal, in world item searches do), the returned links will launch the corresponding webpage for each item that’s returned.

Admittedly, this feature is more of a proof of concept than something that will vitally effect the life of the every SecondLife resident.

However, I do think it’s interesting as this is one more bridge between the greater Internet and SecondLife.

If you need a SearchHUD, you can get one at:

SLURL: Second411 shop in Takalo.

With the grid down, I had plenty of time to finish up the long awaited Advanced Search Page.

Now, for the first time you can search for items within SL that are of specific types, created by specific people with specific permissions.

A few examples:

- Jeans with Modify Permissions

- Objects Created by Angela Salome with Transfer Permissions

- Tables created by Tao Takashi with Modify and Transfer permissions

This is brand new, if anyone notices anything crazy with it, please email me at hal9k[at]second411.com or IM me “Hal9k Andalso” inworld.

Thanks and happy searching!