The Electric Sheep Company released a new beta search engine over easter weekend, accessible to anyone in the metaverse and beyond. It allows you to search publicly accessible sims for particular items for sale. The search is supplied by an in-world avatar named Grid Shepherd who jumps from sim to sim, gathering information on prims available for sale.
There was a meeting held last night in regards to this new development, and despite Prokofy Neva’s various attempts to pick a fight, the Sheep stood their ground and would not be swayed. They developed something good, they think, and they are willing to stand by it.
This morning Prokofy Neva of the Second Life Herald attempted mutiny on the project by claiming invasion of privacy. “Get off my fucking lawn,” she repeated over and over. She claimed that the system was entirely opt-out, and therefore entirely invasive and wrong.
What one fails to do, however, is bother to ask the ESC Head of Household about the project. Forsetti Svarog responds:
“There are definite privacy issues at stake here, and we want to be extremely sensitive to those. Purely opt-in systems, to be frank, die at birth. They simply cannot get off the ground. Purely opt-out systems are too invasive.
Our choice was a middle ground: we look at objects on publicly accessible land, and we collect information about the products listed “for sale”. Those objects show up in search results, and people can teleport directly from the website to the object’s location in-world. We have not yet extended the search to scripted vendors, but rather only gather information about things marked for sale in the prim’s General properties. In the process, we unearthed an unfortunate Second Life bug listing things for sale that were not intended to be for sale, but we are working on addressing that in the search engine, and have notified Linden Lab of the bug.”
Unfortunately for the Electric Sheep Company, then, this is a Linden Lab bug that the new ESC search engine happened to pick up on. Not the ESC’s fault, although it appears that the ESC is not willing to play the blame game but rather put a good foot forward and work with their partners to solve the problem.
On the Second Life Herald, however, this issue fails to be at a close. Prokofy Neva has gone as far as to call a boycott on the ESC; she suggests blogging about the new search (possibly even adding in a well-placed “fuck you” if you feel like it) or creating anti-ESC textures and spamming the in-world search with it.
Christian Prior, creator of the search engine, has updated the few outstanding glitches he knew about and states what he fixed in his blog:
- Changed the opt-out mechanism at SheepLabs HDQ so that objects of individuals who opt out are immediately removed from search results. Note that it will still take 24-48 hours for your items to appear in results after opting in or back to default — i.e., this only affects residents’ ability to quickly remove their items from our service.
- Fixed a bug which caused a very small subset of items that were not actually for sale to appear as products (the “for sale” checkbox on items is not quite authoritative: both objects which are marked “for sale: copy” but are no-copy for current owner and objects which are marked “for sale: original” but are no-transfer to current owner can display a check in the “for sale” field without actually being purchasable)! Huge thanks to Cory Edo for helping nail down these outliers.
The ESC encourages anyone who has concerns or comments on improving the search beta to please visit them online and leave a comment or mail them.
secondlifetribune 
I love how you blather on and make it appear that these greedy scrapers are “listening to the community” because they “found a bug” that “unfortunately” showed things for sale.
But that completely distracts from the problem of the overwhelming majority of things shown for sale that aren’t a bug. They are showing for sale because people leave stuff out for sale in homes for all kinds of reasons that do NOT have to do with wishing the entire public on the grid to TP into their bedrooms. Sometimes the for-sale status stays on a purchased item. Or they deed a TV to the group or undeed it or whatever. It’s just not the right of one company to grab all this data for its own commercial use.
Opt-in might take longer to populate. But in a world, which is something very different than a web page, you have to take that time. What’s the hurry? Have to impress your clients that you pwn the grid and its data and can scrape at will? *We’re* not impressed.
Those companies that can take the time to reach a comfort level for people living and working on the grid and respecting their privacy, along with making a profit for themselves, will simply do better in the long run.
And I’m happy to use insult-radio talk on people who in fact egregiously insulted me and my tenants *first* by scraping their private information without consent.
I wasn’t aware you had the ability to speak of the grid as a whole, Prokofy. All hail the SL entity Prokofy Neva!
Ms. Neva is only upset because this is an ESC project. If it were an SL Stratics-sponsored search-engine, she’d be happily contributing her tenants’ information.
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