Flawed or not, the old Search / Places had a much higher usability than the new web-based search which has flaws that are inherent to the way HTML works and compounded by the fact that we're stuck with a single browsing window in SL.

Problems:

• visibility of search results

• old search: 24 without scrolling / 100 with scrolling / 1 click advancement to the next 100
• new search: 8 at a time without scrolling / 10 with scrolling

• browsing the results

• old search: 1 click
• new search: 3 clicks all over the screen (click the result, click back, click the next result)

• combination of the two above: required actions to browse the first 20 results

• old search: 20 clicks
• new search: 63 clicks (3 per result - see above, one for advancing, two for scrolling each of the 2 result pages)

• speed

• old search: near instant
• new search: 5-30 seconds per page view

• features

• old search: ability to use "Show on Map" (necessary if you want to see if people are there before you tp)
• new search: non-existant

• old search: search by Parcel Category
• new search: non-existant

• old search: location of the parcel (sim name + coordinates of the landing point)
• new sarch: only the sim name is present

• reliability

• old search: excellent - only breaks when LL turns it off to reduce load
• new search: unacceptable- in-world browser bugs are fixed only to be end up broken again and new ones are introduced with every new viewer update and don't qualify for "Showstopper" status so new updates ship with searching utterly crippled

Current issues with the web based search/in-world browser that have gone unfixed for over 2 months now:

• typing text into the browser based text box doesn't work for all residents
• clicking links doesn't work for all residents
• scrolling doesn't work for all resident

There isn't one single usability advantage the new search has over the old search.