In the latest RC viewer (1-20-7-87883) the old "Places" tab was replaced by a new one which acts as a subset of the "All" search. This offers nothing new and is In fact it less useful than "All" because it only searches Places.

Although the old "Places" tab had its faults --namely that it was sorted by the Traffic score by default-- it was still a useful tab for many of us. Why can't the old "Places" tab remain? Surely the old and new can co-exist - there is enough room for an extra tab. Until such time that the "All" search sorts results perfectly please bring back the old "Places" tab!

The following are benefits of the old "Places" tab (which are purely my opinions)...
1) The dual-pane design made it very fast to look through results: Do a search, click on a place, see the graphic, read the description, click on the next one, etc. All while requiring no page load like the new search.
2) Because it was integrated into the UI and the font size was not small, it was easier to read than the new search.
3) Traffic, although a gamed score, can still be useful for determining whether to visit a place or not. For instance - a place with traffic of zero is clearly of no interest to anyone. A place with a high traffic denotes land that is either used by many residents, or is at least cared for by someone willing to spend L$ on campers (a form of advertising that gives money back to the SL community rather than LL).
4) The response times seem much quicker for those search tabs that are built into the UI. The ones that require a webpage to load seem to be much slower.