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ESC have bought us a new, nearly grid-wide, search engine. This engine is a little different to others (e.g. SLateIt) in several respects. Firstly, it’s run by a bot-avatar called Grid Shepherd who automatically spiders the grid, and secondly it (currently at least) only shows items for sale. I must admit I was a little surprised to see some things of mine for sale listed on there, and will be correcting that soon!

As you might imagine there are a variety of responses to this. Over on 3pointD Mark is happy to see it arrive, some of those that comment are less sanguine. Over on SLH Prokofy is sounding uncharacteristically against making money, but characteristically paranoid that it’s all a ploy to exploit him. Potentially more worryingly for the future of the project, Anshe has banned it from all of her land for “violating the covenant.”

I’m ambivalent to be honest, I can’t see it hurting people if they check their own properties (it’s easy enough to search by your own name and see what you’ve got marked for sale), although future developments along the same lines (say searching for everyone with items created by me) veer closer to Big Brother than I’d like to see. If you don’t want to be spidered, ban the avatar “Grid Shepherd” or, make sure there’s nothing for sale on your land. You can also head over to ESC HQ to opt out permanently.

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