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Don't anthropomorphize
computers.
They don't like it. -anonymous |
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theBot requires sound, Windows OS, and the Shockwave plugin. Though it originally ran on both Windows and Mac, current Mac shockwave versions completely break theBot's graphics. You'll probably need to accept a pop-up or turn off pop-up blockers. And for best results, lower your screen resolution to as close to 640x480 as possible. (theBot is old (from 2000) and was designed for smaller screens and more trusting browsers.) To reboot a running Bot, roll mouse over lower right portion of Bot window, and shy reboot button will appear. Please do not enclose your query in quotes. theBot doesn't like them.
Need a Search Idea? More swell projects by the same human can be found at plagiarist.org and amy-alexander.com Contact theBot:
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theBot (one infesting the horse) [2000] is the second in a series of at least two net art projects based on web bots. A bot is a computer program designed to act as a robot, gathering a variety of information from the web. Search engines, such as Yahoo and Altavista, typically use bots to gather information for their databases. A common type of bot is a spider. A spider follows links between web pages, traversing the web by crawling from document to document. theBot is a spider. When fed a searchterm by a visitor, theBot performs a search for the word or phrase in a search engine. It then selects one page from the choices returned by the search engine, and reads a piece of text from the page. From there, it crawls to a linked page, and continues reading scraps of text from each page it visits as it crawls from page to page. If theBot cannot link out from a page or gets tired after too long on a given server, it backs up along its path and moves out in a different direction. Easily bored, theBot tries to move between different servers as much as possible and will never visit the same page twice unless fooled into it. As something of a reverse search engine, theBot provides a look (and listen) into the narrative of the web - or at least into the stream of consciousness of a web Bot. theBot requires:
theBot prefers a fairly fast CPU, works
properly when it wants to, and spends its leisure time learning to speak
French through Babelfish.
*** Due to limitations of Shockwave audio on the Mac, theBot performs
best on a Windows system.
From Robots, Spiders, Crawlers and Wanderers - Highway
Robbers on your Web Site bot - the larva of a botfly; especially :
one infesting the horse
From Webster's Online Dictionary
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