Improvement Suggestions

[Tom Spilman]

I just found this tool today and it looks like it has a lot of promise.  Our product is a game... a mobile game for WP7 and soon iOS and Win8.

A bunch of suggestions for improvement:

Filter by File Extension
I get WAV and MP3 results at times from my application title...  I can exclude these an many other common file extensions and be pretty sure its not my content.

Filter by File Size
I often get tiny files or very large files which are impossible to be our content.  If I could define a min/max file size that would help limit the results to things that are remotely possible to be our content.

Google Search
I do a lot of piracy hunting via Google.  Google search indexes many forums which post links to pirated content.  It would be nice to see a more advanced engine which searches via Google, then downloads and parses the page links Google returns for links to well known file sharing site URLs.

Ignoring Files
Sometimes I get the same file over and over in results and it is not my file.  Being able to block a particular file name from all results would be very helpful.

Ignoring URLs
When I get a false result in the search I would like to be able to ignore that result so that it no longer appears for searches of that campaign.  This way I can remove results that I repeated get that are incorrect matches.  

Being able to see my list of ignored results is also important so I can fix any mistakes.

Fix The Size Column
The size column seems to be sorting via textual alphabetization and not really a number.  So I get "53.62 MB", then "55,352 KB", then "54.1 MB".  You should be trying to parse the text into an actual number... taking into consideration all the ways people write file sizes, and sorting by that.

Double Check Via Free Anonymous Proxy
While some sites now report "This service has been blocked in your country" others do something more evil like "File not found" (letitbit and oron seem to do this).  Still I want to find these links and send DMCA takedowns.

What I tend to do is use free anonymous proxy services to double check if the file is truly down... or just faked and downed for my IP only.  I could provide a current example, but this forum doesn't let me post URLs yet.

It would be nice for Crack Tracker do a double check of results via an anonymous proxy like this.

Fix Bad Name and Size Parsing
The following result sites don't seem to parse the file name and size information correctly leaving those columns empty:

2shared_dot_com
4shared_dot_com
bitroad_dot_net
filefactory_dot_net
filesmonster_dot_com
oron_dot_com
zippyshare_dot_com

- Tom

[nikos]

Hi Tom and thank you for your feedback

most of your concerns are already covered in the manual and specific blog posts. So for example to prune search results using size and other properties see

www.cracktracker.net/blog/prune-search-results.htm

the size column IS calculated numerically, you just need to observe the units

sorting by extension (type) isn't as easy as you imagine as the title of the download doesn't necessarily include it. You can use the filter box (next to the DMCA button) to quickly select e.g. names containing MP3 then right click on them to blacklist them (you won't see this menu command unless you buy crack tracker)

finally cracktracker can search through a proxy using the (undocumented) command line switch /P, (e.g. /P:1.2.3.5:8000) but this will make the search slower and perhaps less reliable if the proxy isn't responsive. See here for more information

http://www.cracktracker.net/blog/cyberl ... -storm.htm

[Tom Spilman]

> So for example to prune search results using size and
> other properties see

I know I can prune by manually selecting and deleting...  my point was that could be automatic.

Anyway... thanks.

[nikos]

you only need to prune results if your search keyword is common or weak. And with permanently blacklisting irrelevant results, the pruning effort is reduced over time