Private investigations in searching

The Path of the Seeker

Like a skilled native, the able seeker has become part of the web. He knows the smell of his forest: the foul-smelling mud of the popups, the slime of a rotting commercial javascript. He knows the sounds of the web: the gentle rustling of the jpgs, the cries of the brightly colored mp3s that chase one another among the trees, singing as they go; the dark snuffling of the m4as, the mechanical, monotone clincking of the huge, blind databases, the pathetic cry of the common user: a plaintive cooing that slides from one useless page down to the next until it dies away in a sad, little moan. In fact, to all those who do not understand it, today's Internet looks more and more like a closed, hostile and terribly boring commercial world. Yet if you stop and hear attentively, you may be able to hear the seekers, deep into the shadows, singing a lusty chorus of praise to this wonderful world of theirs -- a world that gives them everything they want.

The web is the habitat of the seeker, and in return for his knowledge and skill it satisfies all his needs.

The seeker does not even need any more to hoard on his hard disks whatever he has found: all the various images, musics, films, books and whatsnot that he fetches from the web... he can just taste and leave there what he finds, without even copying it, because he knows that nothing can disappear any more: once anything lands on the web, it will always be there, available for the eternity to all those that possess its secret name...

The web-quicksand moves all the time, yet nothing can sink.

In order to fetch all kinds of delicious fruits, the seeker just needs to raise his sharp searchstrings. In perfect harmony with the sourronding internet forest, he can fetch again and again, at will, any target he fancies, wherever it may have been "hidden". The seeker moves unseen among sites and backbones, using his anonymity skills, his powerful proxomitron shield and his mighty HOST file. If need be, he can quickly hide among the zombies, mimicking their behaviour and thus disappearing into the mass.

Moving silently along the cornucopial forest of his web, picking his fruits and digging his jewels, the seeker avoids easily the many vicious traps that have been set to catch all the furry, sad little animals that happily use MSIE (and Outlook), that use only one-word google "searches", and that browse and chat around all the time without proxies, bouncing against trackers and web-bugs and smearing all their personal data around.

Moreover the seeker is armed: his sharp browser will quickly cut to pieces any slimy javascript or rotting advertisement that the commercial beasts may have put on his way. His bots' jaws will tear apart any database defense, his powerful scripts will send perfectly balanced searchstrings far into the forest.