After all the noise in SL Herald yesterday (here and here), about new search engine and privacy…
I was expecting a search engine other than default Linden’s. It was inevitable. Through the whole history of internet, search engines are important, profitable and authority building projects. That reason is enough for many attempts of new SE. Other one is community need for something better than what we have. To be honest, given search feature is almost to nothing, especially when compared to flatworld engines. But, for me it sounded reasonable that some of flatworld search systems will jump in.
Yesterday morning’s paranoia burst was a bit of overreaction but some facts have seen the light of the day at least for the moment. Search engines do scan data over the internet. It would be not much of a problem except because of draining resources of already laggy grid. But some features of Grid Shepherd are problematic:
Bot does not need to be on the same parcel as scanned object is. Using camera zoom function its range is 92 meters. So, land owners do not have the option similar to robots.txt in the flatworld. You can ban the bot from your property, but you cannot prevent it from scanning it. We are already running into skyboxes to keep away from other resident’s eyes, now there are scripted stalkers as well.
Shepherd is interested in commercial objects only. I know there is a profit in those, but what about sims, events, sandboxes, groups or anything else that is not commercial? It doesn’t deserve to be searched for? Services of SL are sometimes profit-oriented in such measure that it makes me sick.
Service’s default is that all of us wants to be scanned. If you don’t want your objects to be scanned you are free to go to the Shepherd’s page and opt-out, that is, to tell that you don’t want your objects to show up in the results. First thing, you can remove your stuff from the results shown but not from the database. Second, it would be normal to opt-in, i.e. to tell the service that you want to be listed. This way, you might not know that some of your items are for sale. Maybe it is your mistake but it happens. Maybe you don’t know there is an alternative search engine in the world, but you still don’t want it to scan through your house.
This last point leads to new discussions. There are two ways search engines work. First group are getting their data from users, you submit your web page or object to the engine. Second group use bots. Flatworld greatly benefited when crawlers came. But here we come to the point where flatworld and second life significantly differs. As Prokofy Neva pointed yesterday in the Herald: “You don’t have sex on or with a google page.” And it is a tough question. It is a question where is the line of privacy of lives that are based on public infrastructure like internet is. Something to bang our heads in the days to come.
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