Given how readily data is supposed to be available in the sixth world, do your players, or groups make use of sixth world search engines? Do they Google names, addresses, or other points of interest? I see no way that even the best hacker/cracker in the world, even with a legion of corporate funding could keep track of every search engine, all of the time.

I find one of the most satisfying things about Shadowrun is that we really have no idea what the corps are capable of. Maybe thy have found a way to monitor everything maybe not.

Sorry, i didn;t really answer your question.

Errr your post confuses me, it's very easy to track search engines. It's already done conventionally in real time. For a corporation who both control their own search engines and can therefore see who is searching what and who can control the bandwidth to see what requests go where controlling search engines would be simplicity itself by RL means.

Now as to how search engines are represented I hadn't given it much luck. When my players want to use one I give it an AR bonus, but for the best security and results your better off with your own browse program which, I might add, are cheap as dirt comparatively. In other words I don't think the corps allowed search engines to come to fruition.

Do search engines still exist in the way we know them? A P2P approach would suit the wireless matrix architecture better: you ask your neighbours who ask their neighbours who ask their neighbours who...

I'm pretty sure this is covered by the data search skill. (Did I remember the name right? AFB atm)

It's covered by Data Search+Browse (or the Fetch agents described in Unwired).

But if you want to develop it further, I think that the search engines of 2070 aren't like Google, but closer to what you have on wap cellphones with closed carrier portals. Forget everything about net-neutrality and "free" internet: if you want something, you pay. There's no centralized search engines, and the search engines that are available are closer to "yellow pages" where people sometimes have to pay to be referenced (or te be the first on the list) and where each new Matrix site has to go through a validation process ("for the security of end users", of course).

My apologies. I didn't know that. I do not work in the technology field, and have little interest in it-so I'm not surprised when I'm wrong here and there!

Can someone in the know tell me just how much someone can learn from your Google usage? Anyone feel like predicting it's status in 207x?

indeed, and thats what leads me to suspect that most wageslaves do not use high end comlinks for personal use.

instead, they use cheapo response 1 devices that they basically use to log into a corp MSP node, that then act as a kind of all in one online computer, providing software, agents and other stuff running on some corp nexi (or cluster of nexi).

when they then head to the office, unless they are some cubicle farm "paper" pusher that never handle "sensitive" data and can work in VR from the apartment easy chair, they hand in the private comlink, and access a on-site device after getting past the checkpoint and inside the signal dampening walls.

basically, the easiest way to grasp the matrix of SR is to say that the internet and the web as we know it never happened.

instead, the BBS of the 80's have gone VR.

What is Google but a set of web spiders (ie very primitive Knowbots) that search the internet for information and then categorize that information. I would think that when you are doing a data search you have a custom tailored knowbots that you send out into the Matrix to find certain information for you. Your Data Search + Browse roll is a combination of the criteria you are giving the knowbots + your ability to decipher the information presented to you. I would think that a good search program would be a shadow created knowbots that know some low level security hacks so they can obtain some semiprotected information in their searches.

So how serious is searching for information on your target in 207x? Say I get hired to do a smash and grab on a Saeder Krupp facility in Seattle, and I decide to just Google the target, and see what information is publicly available.

Yes, there's a good deal of data available publicly online, or through private networks and data havens. However, big boys have people whose only job it is is to control information leaks.

If you are hoping to find what Janitor's Bob's address is, it's probably not real hard. If you're hoping to find the secret recipe to Ares Cola, however, it won't exist for just data searches.

Of course: they do not want people to learn that it is based on corpses.

i hate it when my recently bought bottle goes shedim on me!

Hell yes they do!!! I mentioned it once and now they "Google" everything, especially since they don't have a PC hacker. I don't make them do a Data Search for common data either. Search engine technology should really rock by 2072.

In fact, I have stated that they can basically run a search and then take all of the facts and wrap it up in a neat little package and send it to a pal. They've had a hacker NPC buddy that would send them output for simple queries in an interactive package, pretty much with wiki and html linking intact. It's the future baby, treat it as such!

I'll certainly look up anything that comes up that seems relevant; but then I'm a curious, control-oriented person. I tend to play wizards, SR is the first game where hackers exist, so..

What I did earlier with a wizard in SR was to buy a few hundred rating 6 datafiles (fairly cheap) just to have a fair chance to have good info on anything that comes up.

However, the BBS-like nature of the matrix wasn't very obvious to me until I started reading this forum a couple of days ago. It might change the way I use it (if data havens fulfill wikipedia-like roles of providing free data).



I think there's a nice spot for Horizon in the consumer information market. Anyone else see paralells between Horizon and Google?



Also, what does it take to have access to a data haven? Should you take it as a contact perhaps?

Nice observation, I do now! I've haven't gave a lot of thought to Horizon; that definitely helps visualize them.

now there's a thought. probably roll them with a bit of aol and facebook for good measure.

hell, they have already shown themselves to be impressive opinion manipulators, just watch pulsar during emergence.

it would not surprise me if the dawkings group pulls some meme seeding ever so often. Hmm, now that i think about it, and that i am reading the dune saga, meme seeding sounds a fair bit like the bene gesserit myth seeding.



i guess it would depend on the kind of data handled, and where the physical location is set up. If its running out of some free city or similar, one can probably just "walk in", but expect a lot of spam and misdirection seeding. Shadowland and now jackpoint are more invitation or "if you can crack your way in, welcome".

I'm pretty sure (but my be mistaken) that in some fiction I was reading a while back (I think it was Born To Run) that they mention a public search engine called gaugle or some other play on words of google.
I'll check it later to be sure, as for montering it we can do that today, with the matrix at what it is in 2070 I'm guna say just about any of the Corps can find out what the hell your searching. Your fine as long as you use a homemade browse program but otherwise people are guna know what your up to.
That said with all the flow data unless you happen to search a big bunch of codewords from a corp project or go around useing Horizon search to look for jackpoint or shadowland* you'll be fine.
*Do the corps know about jackpoint?

The corps most certainly do, they certainly knew about shadowland.

That is not such a big deal for runners: corps are not supposed to know who they are in the first place. It might be much more dangerous for public figures: did you know that Brackhaven has a fetish for mixed elf/orc porn?

The risk for the runner would rather be that the corp tries to know who performed searches related to a run just done. Runners can deal with it by starting a buzz before the run to drown their datatrail in false positives. All the corp will get is that 4709 SINless in Seattle searched for the XCore project 48 hours before the prototype got stolen. As it is generally impossible to find the start of the buzz, it's the end of the trail.

I think any corps sponsored search engine, which would be the ones the majority of people use, the majority of the time, would be heavily edited for what the search can return. Anyone remember Google agreeing to censor the internet for China in order to gain them as a market? In the heavily corps favorable SR mythos, it seems highly likely that a search engine would return only what the corps it belonged to wanted you to find.

Search engines rely on having an extensive database available, whoever controls that database controls what the search engine can effectively do.

The issue is that the Ares sponsored search engine would have oodles of stuff that Aztechnology would rather you not know....

Then the search engine itself would probably be Availibility 4F or so in areas they controlled. No big deal to shadowrunners, but the majority of the populace, the people Aztechnology would really worry about, would not have it.

Shadowrunners make light of illegality of items, but that tends to be a relatively decent deterrent when it comes to things people do not particularly care about acquiring, unlike drugs. Like many types of knowledge in many of the military regimes, distribution to more "elite" citizens was generally not punished, only distribution to the general populace would be treated severely.

I don't think it would have limited availability. However, it's not like it's going to have Aztechnology secrets (or else they're not secrets any more). It likely does have propaganda, but if 70% of your search engine results were regularly propaganda, how much stock would you put in any of it?

What it will have is things like the actual history of Aztechnology and Aztlan. Along with lots of documentation, videos, pictures, on the founders and their numerous victims.

It would have history (probably not its 'actual' history, any more than Japanese history books presented the 'actual' history of WWII), and plenty of stuff on blood sacrifice (which is nothing new). Things like blood magic, which is a well-kept secret, wouldn't be really available, or the data would be spotty, and connections between blood magic and say the horrors wouldn't really exist at all.

And I'm sure the results change regularly as competing groups google bomb, hack, redirect, use DDoS and such to alter history.

There isn't any compelling reason to not reveal the actual truth, as long as you don't expose things like methods and sources. Ares really doesn't like Aztechnology, at pretty much all levels. And their history and trail of bodies is pretty ugly.

You might not go into the details of blood magic, but with cell videos, news articles and such you could put together things that would be totally 100% accurate about what they do and paint them in the worst possible light without working hard.

Is Blood Magic use by the Azzies still a secret? I thought Dunkelzahn unveiled it in his wills.

Still in 206X here, but none the less, surely the Knowbots are part of the "Search Engine" for the Matrix. Gven the Vr immersion of the Matrix I would imagine Search Engines to either be self programmed or purchased along with your MSP contract or independantly purchased and resemble more closely Macros used in things like WoW and other MMORPGS rather than google. That said, Google could still exist in some form still ad based and everything. You go into the Google matrix site and plug in your serahc perameters and off runs the Google knowbots that then dump everything back to you. Obviously that would only work for Public Access Matrix sites.

Why do you guys really think that it would be more difficult to obtain information in the future? Google doesn't store the information that you're looking up nor do they create it. They have bots that look for it and they keep a big ol' Internet index, that's about it. Yes, I'm aware there's more to it, but basically, that's the jist.

If you take a look at other Internet search engines the techology is evolving to make it easier for you to find information, not the other way around.

I am not saying that you can just Google "How to make a Panther Cannon" in 2072 and expect a diagram. The site that would host that knowledge would be taken down. The Google of the future may even choose to catagorize it as an illegal site and not index it (like it does certain pornography sites today). But when you want to know public knowledge, which can be EXTREMELY useful to shadowrunners, then as long as they have a commlink with Matrix access they should be able to retrieve any and all public information in moments.

In SR's world, Google might have never existed. The Internet as we know it might have never existed. Looking back at the Matrix of SR1, it was closer to BBS/Minitel.
To me, the 2070's Matrix is what the Internet would have been had it been designed by corps for the general public rather than scientists and militaries for themselves.



The technology might be evolving that way, the political/economical side isn't. Carriers are trying to get rid of the network neutrality, governments are trying to censor part of the internet...

Right. Like Blade said, the development of the Internet was hijacked pretty early on, and with the crash of 2020, it was built from the ground up by corps, for corps. Because of the enforced segregation of data we see now, a classic google search engine would not work (or it would be limited to those hosts who opt in, which I assume won't be very many). Data searches are still very big money and, even more so, a source of power, so I assume every corporation who can will run their own search engine, which would be limited to either data hosted by that corp, its subsidiaries, or other corps willing to either opt in or pay to get in (remember, not appearing in a data search is like not appearing in the phone book. It's quite possible businesses need to pay to be listed in say AreSearch), or the data has to be created/recreated and ported over and stored on Ares servers.

I imagine datasearches of the future would be like a mix of phone books, private network search engines, facebook and wikipedia.

I would still think that Matrix 2.0 is more like the modern internet with more interconnectivity and a push to a more net neutral environment. Corps would still have full control over their systems and would more then likely have internal search engines but I would expect companies like NeoNet would have built in a Matrix wide search engine that the other corps adopted (along with the wireless infrastructure) so that customers can find their sites quickly and efficiently. I would strongly expect that this corporate search engine is heavenly monitored by the Corporate Court, NeoNet, MCT, or any number of other Megacorp interests but it would provide a "Google like" service for people on the matrix.

It just sounds stupid to have a brand new Matrix that can be accessed anywhere, and people still need to go to each corporation's website separately and do separate data searches for the same info. This doesn't fly right now, and it wouldn't fly in an alternative future with a world wide interconnected matrix.

If they had really done a corp centered network they would have secured it between the 2029 and and the 2064 worldwide computer disaster. How many times have the Devs done the worldwide computer hacking disaster anyhow? 4, 5? You'd think that somewhere along the way people would have heard of this old tradition called "backups", but noooo.

The fact that most of the corporate sites came up the second they converted the data to Matix 2.0 would have me guess that they did do some form of backups. My guess is that rouge AI took out some online backups as well during the crash.

the difficulty of finding something depends on two things, how obscure (with SR4A introducing a level of "cant be found online") and how large a area one is searching (with the whole matrix being the one producing the longest time between tests towards beating the threshold).

how its done, hammering at a single search engine, or going from node to node, is pure fluff and up to the vision of the matrix and SR, and can change from game to game. The rules are quite simple, want to find something decide how large a area of the matrix you want to search, and the GM decides how obscure the information is, then roll a extended test against threshold, with in game time taken based of number of rolls needed...

Actually, there is this long article talking about how some corp actually had a working site that survived and gained this huge advantage, with all the other corps being down. So, no they didn't.

The wireless matrix took over a year per the fluff, which is still crazy fast.

Actually that's not a site, that's Horizon already having the Wireless Networks up and ready to go in Los Angeles which actually helped them weather the crash and stay up and operational in their home city, which was a huge boon to them.

The other corp that came out of the crash mostly untouched was SK and indeed much of europe as when the Jaeger worm was cascading all over. Big L said "No not yours" and pretty much took the SK owner telecoms off the gird before the worm hit sparing his operations and as a sideline much of the European networks from the worst of it. The fact that SK had that level of control and a secret "Kill Switch" implies a frightening level of information control at least in the european theater.

Saeder-Kroogle already has the market wrapped up. Lucky investment in the wake of Google's insolvency in the Crash…

~J

I agree. I think that people are failing to see that corporations, even though runners see them as the enemy, are competing to make a buck. They are providing services and products to the masses while trying to one-up the competition. And being that humans demand cheap and easy corporations are going to do what they can to appear to have the best easy and cheap offers.

As for Google I don't know if it wouls still exist but it's hard to say. If they adapted with the times then they could still be around.


Also, if anyone really wants info on how data searches work check out:

SR4A, p 230
Unwired, p 13
Unwired, p 26

I think that Unwired page 26 shows how easy it is to obtain information.

"Anyone can run a data search. Pop a name and SIN into the search box and click go. Even the clumsiest user can perform a search on something (or someone) that will return amazing amounts of information. A basic search on a person can turn up name, birthdate, birthplace, parent’s names, employer, work history, criminal history, education, marriages, even a SIN. In-depth searches can turn up even more. And that’s just by a regular Joe; hackers and technomancers can dig up information that even the subject didn’t know."

So even SINs are fairly easy to nab from standard data searches.

I get the feeling Horizon was heavily inspired by Google. Google is very unlike most of the 80s-like corporations in Shadowrun. They don't seem to be all that evil, offer a lot of things to the public for "free". They're very active in "soft" field like meme manipulation and information management.

And yet, this being SR, I'm sure there's something dirty. RL Google isn't entirely clean either; consider China, consider that they scan your mail to personalize advertisements. They track a lot of people's internet usage "to improve their search register", and they have vast influence over other websites, because if you're not high on the Google rankings, you might as well not exist.
Combine this with everything bad about Big Media (Evil Liberal and yet Owned By The Republicans at the same time, apparently) and you get an inkling of how scary they could be.

not sure what book it showed up, but horizon has a dawkins group that work on different projects that may not take good to sunlight.

and grabbing a sin on its own is not useful, as it needs to be matched up to data, fingerprints, dna or similar, of the user.