🔍 Bring Back Legacy Search

[bennettgoble]

The search experience in the official Second Life viewer is entirely web-based and lacks the responsiveness, discoverability, and integration of the legacy in-viewer search system. Many long-term users still express frustration with the web search's latency, filtering limitations, and interface inconsistency with the rest of the viewer UI.

Key user concerns include:

• Poor filtering and result relevance in the web search interface.
• Loss of tabbed browsing for specific types of search (e.g., People, Groups, Places, Land Sales).
• Inability to preview user profiles, land info, or group pages inline without jumping to external browser-like interfaces.

This creates friction in discovery, social interaction, and commerce within Second Life.

Solution

Reintroduce the classic in-viewer search tabs within the search floater, restoring a fast, native-feeling search experience for key categories, while retaining the current web search in a separate “Web” tab for completeness and continuity.

This hybrid model offers users a faster, more intuitive method to search within defined categories, with the benefit of immediate UI feedback and profile preview integration.

Screenshots from other viewers

The original tabbed search was revived/preserved in many Third Party Viewers:

Firestorm's Search

Alchemy's Search

Proposed Changes

• Reinstate the legacy search categories as tabs in the main search floater:
  • People
  • Groups
  • Places
  • Land Sales
  • Events
  • Classifieds
• Add the current web-based search under a new “Web” tab, preserving its functionality without removing it.
• Each tab will restore its respective backend search queries and present results in a viewer-native layout.
• User profile previews and in-viewer data panels should be reinstated for People, Groups, and Places where applicable.

Goals and KPIs

• Search tab usage (non-Web) >50% after feature launch

Risks

• Dual search system (native + web) may confuse some users if not clearly differentiated.
• Viewer QA scope increases across multiple search paths.

Alternatives considered

• Improving the web search only: discarded due to ongoing UX limitations.
• Replacing the web search entirely: risks breaking compatibility with third-party content systems and existing workflows.

Reward

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[bennettgoble]

/reward 400

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💪 Comment /try below and start working on it!
🙌 Once your PR is open, comment /claim #4411 either in the PR description or within the comments.

[bennettgoble]

Note for anyone outside of the SL community: this is bit of an "insider baseball" type issue. Please only /try if you are familiar with how legacy search behaves and the backstory for legacy vs websearch. Happy to provide context, pointers if there is sincere interest in understanding implications and context here.

Check if you're the only one trying 👇

You're the first one to try to solve this issue, go for it! 😉

[bennettgoble]

(Not trying the issue, looks like it picked up the / try in my comment.)

[vurtecks]

/try

Check if you're the only one trying 👇

There are already people trying to solve this issue. You're welcome to tackle it independently, but we encourage you to reach out to the contributors that are trying to solve the issue if you'd like to collaborate with them.

The other contributor is: @bennettgoble.

[PeterWanjihia]

/try

Check if you're the only one trying 👇

There are already people trying to solve this issue. You're welcome to tackle it independently, but we encourage you to reach out to the contributors that are trying to solve the issue if you'd like to collaborate with them.

The other contributors are: @bennettgoble @vurtecks.

[vurtecks]

@bennettgoble As of posting this I am no longer attempting to implement the feature

[sidd190]

/try

Check if you're the only one trying 👇

There are already people trying to solve this issue. You're welcome to tackle it independently, but we encourage you to reach out to the contributors that are trying to solve the issue if you'd like to collaborate with them.

The other contributors are: @bennettgoble @vurtecks @PeterWanjihia.