Search Solved?

I was reading SLInsider the other day, and ran across a post by Almathea Blanc about a new product. SLBrowser is a HUD that provides in-world searching for products, and it seems to work pretty well.

Using design principles I admire (Less Is More), the creators of SLBrowser (Felix Wakmann and Diva Canto) have made a truly simple interface. Let's look at a simple example of a search. Say you want to find Bananas in SL. Just type “?bananas” in the chat window, and suddenly a list of banana-related items appears in your HUD. Then click on those entries to TP to the location. Simple! Best of all, it actually found my items, as opposed to the other search experiment by Electric Sheep Company.

After playing with it for a while, I TP'd to SLBrowser HQ and provided some constructive feedback to the creators. Even better, we had a lively discussion with Ordinal Malaprop regarding the security and privacy considerations for the back-end of this service, which turn out to be quite complex and well beyond my capability of typing at this hour. Suffice to say that Felix and Diva are now anonymizing the data and considering an opt-out program.

Good luck to Felix and Diva! If you want to get SLBrowser, go here. Enjoy!