Swarm scans

Scans run on a schedule

You start the first scan yourself, with Start warden at the end of setup, once Warden has your designs, has worked out what it recognizes in them, and has somewhere to look. After that there is no button. Once your organization's checks are scheduled, each place you have switched on is checked on its own schedule, and Coverage says when each is next due.

Two things follow, and they are the two questions people ask first.

A large library is covered over several scans rather than all at once. Every place gives a scan a fixed budget, and Warden spends it on the designs that have waited longest since their last search. Among designs that have waited equally long, the ones marked searched first in your library go first.

Nothing you do makes a scan happen sooner. If you have found a listing yourself you do not have to wait: press Initiate Swarm in Review and paste its address, and Warden fetches that one page and runs everything it has against it. That is a single listing, not a search. There is no way to point Warden at a seller and ask it to go through their shop.

What one pass does

flowchart TD
  A(["Search a place"]) --> B("Could this be yours?")
  B -- "No" --> C["Counted, and nothing more"]
  B -- "Yes" --> D["Recorded, word for word"]
  D --> E["Every check writes what it found"]
  E --> F("Should a person see it?")
  F -- "Yes" --> G(["Needs you"])
  F -- "Warden can say why not" --> H(["Resolved"])
  F -- "No" --> I(["Kept as an observation"])
  class A,G warden
  class B,F ask
  class C quiet

The gate in the middle is the one that matters. Most of what a search returns is a word that matched and nothing more, and a word that matched is not evidence about whose design a listing shows. Warden drops that before it spends anything further on it, and long before it reaches you.

A hit that does not get through leaves a count on the scan and nothing else. It opens no investigation and asks nothing of you.

What a scan puts on the record

An observation is a version, not a row that gets overwritten. When a seller edits a listing, the next scan writes a new observation beside the old one, so an investigation can always say what the page said on the day it was read.

A check that did not run is recorded as a check that did not run. It is never left out and never rounded up to a clean answer.

What a scan can and cannot conclude

Warden compares a listing's photograph against the reference images in your library. What that establishes is narrow and worth stating plainly: it finds your own published photographs being reused. It does not yet recognize your design in a photograph somebody else took.

The comparison has four answers, and they are four different facts:

The last two are gaps in Warden, and Warden draws them as gaps rather than as findings. Only a complete enumeration may record absence, so a photograph that was never fetched is never counted as a photograph that matched nothing.

That rule governs everything a scan writes. Warden says what it saw and what it could not see, and it does not fill in the difference.