I think it's fairly obvious to everyone that fravia+ has enough work on his hands with this site and his time is much better spent with cracking and +HCU matters. I'm neither a +Cracker nor member of any group but out of respect and repayment for all I've learned here, I've picked up the gauntlet to "work well" and building upon fravia+'s original texts I created these hunting lessons for all.

The ability to find the things you seek is of the greatest importance and long before you ever become a great cracker you must learn to hunt fairly well. Before the introduction of +ORC lesson packs by +gthorne, part of the original challenge for completing the lessons was in finding both the targets and the tools. Though there are some great hunters that are poor crackers, there are no great crackers that are poor hunters. It's a necessary skill set for anyone serious about self-edification.

Most people surf the net as point and click lemmings on their way to their last bath. Their idle fascination with flashy sites prevents them from effectively finding anything and slow connections combined with bloated sites dooms these poor people to their watery graves of ignorance. Others think they are searching the net through using a few web engines but they are merely running under false assumptions of effective direction. There are also a rare few who truly know how to hunt the net and most of them have spent many hours searching on the topic of searching in order to learn their art.

Cracking, hacking and hunting, as well as most undernet endeavors and disciplines, constantly interact and overlap such that their definitions become a bit blurred around the edges. The most notable common denominator they share is that they are all "attacks" of some form or another and all of them require skill, study, tenacity and a certain zen approach.

Before you decide the "How" of your approach you first need to decide the "What" of your search. Are you gathering information? Stalking someone? Looking for a file? a crack? a program? Knowing what you are searching for defines the way you go about your hunt but there are some basics that apply to most all hunts.

1. Use pure text when ever possible.
• Text is fast to load and easy to read, especially if you're using a fixed pitch font. Once you have become accustomed to fixed pitch plain text, you'll never use anything else.
• Turn off the image loading in your Navigator (yes, you should be using Netscape rather than Micro$oft) through disabling the Edit|Preferences|Advanced|Automatically_Load_Images option. It speeds things up a *LOT* and saves you from being bombarded by pathetic commercial adds.
2. Always use lower case search strings.
• The string "paris" will retrieve both "paris" and "Paris" but the string "paRis" will only retrieve "paRis"
3. Always use dates limits in your search.
• Pages and files tend to expire and move around, so if you don't have a time limit set in your search (the last three to six months), you'll end up with a lot of dead links and outdated information.
4. Always run searches through multiple engines.
• Even the combined searching power of all the engines is still not enough to cover the net completely.
• All search engines are different and some engines are better suited for certain tasks than others so running them in combination can compensate for various weaknesses.
5. Always use logical operators when they are available.
• If you fail to use the simple logical operators like AND, OR and NOT your search results will yield more garbage than useful information.
6. Keep your privacy by either using the search engines remotely or by browsing anonymously!
• You can use email to fetch the desired queries.
• You can also use The Anonymizer to browse safely.

—>>>—————> Hunting Lessons <—————<<<—
—>>>—————> Outline <—————<<<—

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