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Traditionally within Second Life, as residents grow more adept at building content they form in-world businesses and 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 Second life linden), 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 Secondlife linden.

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.