the Search function for SL Marketplace. It is something I often help New Players with, as they have trouble getting their avi put together the most.

I do have some older avatars from time to time pipe in and go “I never knew I could do that before!”, so while this knowledge certainly isn’t new, I thought it was time to share it, in case there are those of you that just don’t know either.

SL Marketplace has it’s own set of Word Limiters that are word based. We all know about the left sidebar which has a bunch of categories and boxes to click to better zero in on your target items, but the word limiters can further the results down to a few hundred rather than a few thousand items.

As you can see above, there is a lot of things you can do with the sidebar to get a more limited search on the SL Marketplace. This is good for most things. I do a lot of Freebie/Cheapie finding when I am helping new players, and one of the most annoying things is demos.

Demos are a needed things. As a designer myself, I get that. One thing designers do now though, is instead of marking their item as a demo when uploading and filling out the item form, is not check the item as an actual demo. This is why a LOT of demos still show up in your search, even when you tick the demos off. It is their way of skirting the system, so their items still get stats in the search, and chances to be viewed, even if by accident.

There is a way to get rid of those pesky demos from your searches, and that is with the Word Limiters I was talking about earlier.

Now, the Word Limiters don’t do their magic with things like “Damo, D.e.m.o, *D-e-m-o* or D E M O” sadly, so a few things might still pop in, even when using the Word Limiters. But most will be right on out of your Searches!

The Word Limiters are AND, NOT and OR. They do have to be uppercased in order for them to work, but all other words can be in upper or lower case(or combination of).

As seen in the Yellow Boxes above, I have typed “NOT demo” into the keyword search box. I have picked a Category. Now there are many, all with sub categories, so if you don’t know where all those go, you can choose a general one until you get more use to SL Marketplace. I decided to search for boots for this tutorial, so we are in the Apparel Category, under the Women’s Section, then under Footwear.

I also chose my price, which I want to be totally free, so I put in two Zeros.

I ticked off Demos and Limited, as limited will flood your searches with gacha items. Sometimes this is a good thing, it depends on what you are looking for, but in this case, I don’t want it. Most Free Gacha items will just be the Gacha Keys.

The last thing you want to do is hit the Refine Button.

You just went from 250, 000 Items to a few hundred!

Now, you didn’t want any old footwear, you wanted Boots! There is two different ways you can do this. You can use plus in your keyword search; NOT demo+boots. This is really good if you are doing a general search that isn’t so sub categorized. Another way to do it would be; NOT demo AND boots. While using plus will narrow things down, using AND will get you a more narrow result.

The best use of AND would actually be if you were looking for very specific things like Boots AND Blue or Maitreya AND Legacy. Only items with both those words in the description or title will show up.

So you can make a good run of it when typing into the Keyword Search. I used NOT demo AND Fantasy AND Blue OR Green in the Avatar Components Category, under Eyes Sub Category, and got all sorts of results.

Doing something like this will eliminate the demos(if you also have the demos ticked on the left sidebar), bring up all eyes tagged with fantasy and then narrow it down to packs with blue or green.

Now you are looking at the results and are like; “But Helena, I see brown eyes and black eyes, and even yellow eyes!” This all comes down to what the designer put into their description. Things like fatpacks might have blue and green, but also other colours. the search will even pick up store names and designer names, so it could be a yellow fantasy eye, but the store is called Bluemoon. The system isn’t perfect, but it helps narrow you search more.

In the end, that is all we really want.