So you haven’t downloaded the new in-world release candidate? You really should, it’s awesome! Linden Lab is converting all their object/asset data into HTML pages, feed them to a Google Search Appliance, and let us do complex queries on it.
If you’re afraid of downloading “unstable” versions, you can still get a hint on how it looks like, since these are pretty normal webpages, all you need is a Web browser and an Internet connection 🙂 For instance, this is what Linden Lab returns when searching for Gwyneth Llewelyn. Isn’t it neat?
Congratulations to Linden Lab for this extraordinary development — it was definitely quite needed! And, unlike the worst fears of many residents, it makes teleporting to content actually quite easier… and since these are web pages, it also means they’ll get picked up on Google, Yahoo and other search engines, so, one day, you might be able to do a search on Google, see an item in SL, click on an URL, and be directly teleported to the place where that object is found. Now that’s quite fantastic!
Now I only wonder what this means for the dozens of “in-world search engines” like the ones I’ve listed on my blogroll, who use libSL and a pseudo-avatar-bot roaming the grid searching for content. I guess they will quickly become obsolete. Ah well…
