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Second Life, Sept 11 (Reuters) - OpenSim remains in pre-release and the interoperability standards to allow avatars to travel between virtual worlds are still being drafted. But that’s not stopping entrepreneurs from creating a fledgling industry around what’s to come.

Enter Metaverse Ink, which its creators say is the first search engine to find objects on both the Second Life Grid and in OpenSim worlds.

The product presents both a vindication and challenge for Linden Lab. OpenSim-using startups demonstrate the enduring faith of many in Linden founder Philip Rosedale’s vision for virtual worlds. But Metaverse Ink is also a competitive threat. In a July interview with Reuters Linden VP Joe Miller named “search services” as a potential revenue stream for his company in the coming age of interoperability.

Traditionally within Second Life, as residents grow more adept at building content they form in-world businesses and Second life linden sell their creations to other users. Linden Lab frequently touts the number of users with a positive currency inflow — over 61,000 according to the latest statistics — in its marketing.

But with OpenSim in the works, some of Second Life’s most talented programmers are beginning to form businesses that compete directly against Linden Lab.

“Linden Lab’s search is bad, it’s like AltaVista in the old days,” said Metaverse Ink co-founder William Cook (Second Life: Felix Wakmann), a computer science professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Cook and co-founder Cristina Videira Lopes (Second Life: Diva Canto), a computer science professor at the University of California at Irvine, have designed a series of automated programs, called “bots,” to search through both Second Life and OpenSim. The results of their searches are indexed and made searchable to users, in much the same way Google does for the World Wide Web.

To date the MI database catalogs over two million virtual objects, spread over 100,000 regions.

Problems with Linden’s built-in search functionality have been ongoing, and this isn’t the first time a third party has tried to create an independent virtual worlds search engine. A similar attempt to index Second Life by the Electric Sheep Company last year was abandoned after a protest campaign by Second Life users over privacy concerns.

MI says their product respects user wishes. “We’re only publishing things marked ‘for search,’” Lopes said. “These bots can ’see’ everything, but not everything should be seen.”

Cook said his new company isn’t yet looking for venture capital, and is currently focusing on attracting users beyond MI’s current average of about 900 a day. A third MI partner from Techcoastworks, a California-based incubator, is helping to commercialize the product.

But Cook, a serial entrepreneur, has worked with VC firms in the past, having raised US$60 million for a previous start-up from sources including Benchmark Capital, which also funded Linden Lab.

Lopes said MI is the first company to be indexing OpenSim worlds for search. But how does she feel that Linden Lab has said search is an area it wants to explore in the future?