Following the Net art conference that happened last week, I wish to link a page here that is a compilation of search engine manipulation by net artists, compiled by Valéry Grancher: go there.

Also, I just found out today about a project that comes as an answer to the little questions I had at the Net art conference and to which Christophe Bruno started to answer. Read the discussion here.

Sebastian Campion wrote a script called Ghostwriter that spams a number of search engines, in order to test the hypothesis that dot com companies are buying data requests from these engines. Of course, the hypothesis was verified, with Campion spamming the engines with funny or different expressions, and then observing their progression in dot com link ranking (ishop.co.uk for instance). The script can be downloaded and used for your own enjoyment.

The work of Sebastian Campion reminded me of Bruno's concerns and works, in Google Adword Happenings or in Hapax. These experimentations open new ways to raise popularity, and thus is interesting in terms of how the artist defines his work and the virtual reach of its work. 

GHOSTWRITER 2004
Ghostwriter is a browser-application that can be used to spam a selection of search engines with fake web searches.

The search engines are being monitored by keyword marketing companies that collect data about search trends for commercial exploitation - such as dotcom businesses incorporating popular keywords into phony web pages as a way of hijacking hits.

Ghostwriter is a reaction against the commodification and misuse of web searches. It can be used to infiltrate the marketing-surveillance data by running repetitive fake web searches that fools the surveillance software into believing that a sudden trend is taken place.

People are encouraged to anonymously write a poetic, political or simply obscure sentence, submit it as a search and then run the application for a while. After a few weeks - regardless of how absurd a fake search is - it may begin to show up in websearch popularity lists and similar keyword based web pages, thus effectively exposing the spies.