Search > Places is back. Well, sort of back. Mostly back. Reasonably back. Okay, so there's still an issue.
At 2:55PM SLT (Second Life Time) on Friday, Search > Places was finally restored to service, after essentially a full week of downtime. By 18:00 SLT, it had become apparent that there was still one or more problems, and by 18:22 SLT, it was apparent that the problem was 'estates'. Basically, you can't seem to find things that are in another estate.
Most Second Lifers don't really know what a Second Life 'Estate' actually is, beyond the common-coin term in the English language (whichever dialect of it you choose to speak or mangle, or stoically persevere with as a second or third language), so a little background on estates is probably in order.
An estate is one or more sims (always entire sims. Never half a sim, or one and a quarter sims) owned by a single person. That person can change the terrain textures of their estate sims, shove up the privacy walls, restart the sim, adjust how many avatars can be there before it reports full, turn physics on and off. It's like being a tiny god, or so we might imagine. If you pull down the World menu and select Region/Estate you'll see the small array of tools that come with estate-ownership.
All the sims you associate with being a part of the 'mainland' (three continents, with some atolls and islands and yet more popping up every month) are in the main 'mainland' estate. So, if you're in one of those sims, you can use search places to find any place that is also listed in one of those sims -- if what you're looking for is on a privately owned island (another estate) well...you're what we might charitably call 'out of luck'.
Likewise, if you're standing on one of those island estates - say you were on Reuters Island - you wouldn't be able to find any place that was listed anywhere other than Reuters Island.
Back to the drawing board. Hopefully without breaking estate separation with the Teen Grid (the Teen Grid is separate estate on the Main Grid, but remains hidden, like a couple Linden Lab estates, rather than being visible with the rest. Special access controls exist to prevent communication and object transfers between the Teen Grid and Main Grid -- controls that haven't always been one hundred percent successful).
1. I suspect that LL is using some clause in the search query that says "Parcel.Estate.ID = (whichever one you're in)" to limit the results that are being shown. This probably needs to be changed to a clause like "(Parcel.Estate.ID = (whichever one you're in) OR Parcel.Estate.PublicallySearchable = TRUE)"...except it needs to be changed in such a way that the search query doesn't bog down the database.
Posted at 12:59AM on Dec 10th 2006 by Erbo Evans