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.
Besides being a modest manifestation, written in JavaScript, Ghostwriter employs the mechanisms of the keyword industry to investigate the notion of text and secrecy in the context of information technologies. Not only are web searches 'written' by anonymous internet users but subsequently, the searches are secretly recorded, saved, rewritten, sold and published - a string of ghostly events in which the meaning of text is going through a metamorphosis.
Documentation
The images below illustrates the first experiment using Ghostwriter.
Being short of inspiration I typed my own name and ran the script for 3-4 hours. After 3-4 weeks my name started appearing in different poplularity lists and keyword based webpages. Some of them dissapeared again after a few months, while others have emerged.
