~ Essays ~

				essays

(Courtesy of fravia's advanced searching lores)

GetRight lores
by Rumsteack
published at fravia's searchlores in february 2000

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Slightly edited by fravia+

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This trick is useful when you are captured inside all those horrible (and vulgar) "Pandora-boxes" commercial warez and porn sites that spring a thousand silly windows out and lure you with false "enter here" links onto entering other - similarly useless - sites. The ratio signal to noise of such sites is next to zilch and therefore you should never approach them in the first time - whatever kind of warez or even porn you may be looking for.
Let's not forget, also, that seekers travelling with a good hosts filter and all their holy shields up -- junkbuster + proxomitron chained together: see Iefaf's, Bone Digger's and NME's chaining instructions [elsewhere]  -- and moreover without any active java or javascript inside their browser wont need these instructions that badly... and yet what is explained here could come quite handy for every seeker... Thanks Rumsteack! Let's hope to have more feedback on this by whoever will research further into it.

So, what will I talk about ? I've read all the searching section of your old site (or - at least - all the "public" pages) and I realised that you like bots. Bot-mailing, bot-constructing, bot-reversing (!!), bot-everything. So, I'm going to talk about a bot, and to be more precise, a multi-fonction bot (yeah, they are like all things in life, they become multifunctional... bot-wars).
This "bot" is GetRight.

You surely have heard about it. Its MAIN function is to allow the user to resume broken downloads and to download files from different servers at a time. There are other programs like it, but I only use this one since I find it useful for download purposes (and as we will see, for other things as well).
Nevertheless, since you seem to dislike "online downloading" (and prefer accmail style mail-bots), I've shorten the parts which deal with the "simple" retrival of files.

Now, it's explanation time !

The primary use of Getright is, as previously said, to help downloading files. Imagine, you're surfing (what an horrible "lazy" term! We are SEARCHING!) and you discover a useful program called Winzip (I'll explain later why I choose this one..But when I say later, that's later. I mean, in another short essay of mine, provided that you find this one useful). You download it online (this would not happen with a mailbot, of course, but let's keep along my online downloading example for this paper) and Bam!, connection is resetted... After 3 or 4 times, you begin -rightly- to become a little upset. So... you fetch and run Getright. So far, so good, now, when you click on the link of the download, the program takes control of the the download itself, and starts doing what it has been created for... downloading (duh) and resuming when disconnected. Woah! Useful! But Getright can do many other things. It's sad to constate that many searchers don't even know the existence of these other functionalities (which are far more impressive IMHO than the simple download functions of this "bot").

So, we have arrived to the real utility of this beast. Let's take a first example. A common guy is seeking for a warez prog, or a mp3, or an image,or a zip, anything you may be looking for, this is of no importance, but I prefer to choose a warez for this paper in order to demonstrate the useful anti-advertisement function of Getright, since warez sites are INFESTED with useless advertisement (these people not only steal software, but make also money out of this theft). After a search, this poor fellow comes to a site : http://www.supermegagigawarez.com (I hope this does not exist irl, since I just imagined it !). This site is his last hope, cause all other links were dead... So, he opens the site full of hope and... Aaaarggg ! 5 windows have opened, "Vote for me" links everywhere. When he closes one window, 10 more spring up: A Pandora box site!... And when he want to progress in the site, looking for what he was searching, he doesn't find any entrance, click this, enter that... all the ususal bogus cram . After some time, he's discouraged.

Now, imagine that a Getright master (you yourself after having read this, eheh) is making the same research. When he sees the name of the site (names, once more the importance of the names, as always), he thinks "Hum, a commercial site, which is going to eat my system resources...Getright, where are you? I command you: go and fetch!".Once launched, he passes the URL in Getright to download. But, download what ? There's no file to download ! Well, this little bot behaved hisself quite well : he obeys to the standard rules. So, it's going to download the "index.htm" file of the targeted site. Once downloaded, the GetRight Browser Windows opens, and our searcher sees ALL the links of the page in this windows !!! With the knowledge he has of the file he wants (superprogram.zip), which is a warez one, he just has to look at the links on the browser window, and he gets it... For example, I've tried this on a warez site, and the directory structure was something like that : /warez/appz/downloadz/warez/filez/linkz. How could a human being finds his way up to this mess (a part from zen? :-)

We have approached here the site-mapping utility of Getright. Now imagine something else. If a site is a terrible mess (like, with no offense, Fravia's old one)..The webmaster is likely to -ahem- "forget" link to some pages he doesn't want all people to be able to see...With Getright, we can use these errors for our purposes : the links appear immediatly.. This is similar to the agora command -l, but much more powerful I think. And this is also similar to the "View Source" command, but, personnaly, I don't like to read sources in order to fetch links when my bot can do it... Getright is therefore also a link-viewing bot. We have also approached the anti-advertising utility of Getright... Given that we don't see any crap-page at all (only the links), it means no ads, no pop-ups, no banners, no windows, no sounds, no musics, NOTHING but the links. Our holy bandwidth is saved... What else ? The anonimity matters. We left - I believe, but corrections would be welcome - almost no traces with Getright: We accept no cookies, we leave no history behind, we don't use cache. Is it another possible form of "Safe browsing" ? There's just the IP problem, but with a proxy it can be solved. Please tell me if I am making a mistake with this assumption.

But it's not finished yet. There's one more functionality I want to talk about. The "Process Web Page File" option. With Getright, you could easily find the links you want on a site. But imagine once more that the site is a real unstructured mess. Dealing with 300 links in the browser window is not a nice task. So, let's process the adresses of the targeted page. For example, I recently searched some basic sites dealing with Javascipt (I'm learning this "branch of ours" right now). I found a really useful site, with a georgous page with many download links : .zip, .txt, .htm, .doc. Nevertheless, I was only interested in PDF files. So, I passed the adress of the site to the "Process" option of Getright. A new window opened, with all the links of my site. But here, we are no more stuck inside a "site-mapping" logic, we're now in a "download" logic. So, there are boxes where you can select which files to download. Of course, we can select all files of a certain extension : .pdf in my case. Then "OK" and that is. With the number of links, if I would have sorted them out through ultreadit macros (or, even worse, manually), I think I would have been busy for quite some time.

I think there are many other possibilities offered by Getright. If I find new ones, I'll report them here. The few that I reported above, are, IMHO, the most important ones for searchers. We can - at least!- concentrate on the files we are looking for (when seeking files, that is). We are no more disturbed by thousand irrelevant other things.

I hope this little essay can teach something to other readers. Take it as my first re-pay for what fravia's site has learned to me (and continues to teach, as I continue to learn).

I hope I'll read more and more from you soon.

Rumsteack from France

(c) 2000: [fravia+], all rights reserved