■ Are these crack search results really mine?

Crack Tracker is down deep a mindless search robot. It doesn't know whether some download it discovers for you is infringing on your copyright or not. It merely scans for your keyword. If your product name is common (e.g. Acme Widgets) or if you don't choose the search terms carefully, chances are that many false positive results will appear, e.g. products belonging to your competitor or otherwise completely irrelevant to your business.

Therefore you should always inspect the search results before filing your DMCA takedown notices to avoid removing somebody else's files. If there are only a few downloads listed in the results pane (see picture) you can just scroll down the list and select irrelevant items with the mouse and click Delete button to remove them. But what if you have hundreds or even thousands of results? Checking them one by one is tedious.

Crack tracker reports each download link with extra information: the name of the file and its size. You can use these pieces of information to quiclky remove irrelevant results. Here are some quick tips:

Sort by size. You know the size of your software product. When it finds its way in filehosting sites it usually includes patches and keygens, so the download size will be a little bigger. But if your product is 10MB and some download is 100MB, it is unlikely to be yours. So click on the size column heading to sort results by size, and remove all those that are clearly too big to be yours. You could also apply the same reasoning for smaller downloads, but keep in mind that sometimes they could just be a small keygen for your product or even a serial number.
Filter names. If some other company sells software with a similar name (e.g. Foobar Widgets) they may be listed in your search results. Many times crackers put the company name in the download so if you type Foobar in the filter box (next to the DMCA toolbar button) and click Select then all results of this Foobar company will be selected and can be removed with a single click.

Keep in mind that the search results pane in crack tracker behaves a lot like your file manager (e.g. windows explorer) so you can use all the usual methods to select multiple rows:

<Ctrl+click> selects/unselects the row under the mouse cursor — without affecting the items already selected
<Shift+click> selects a range of rows (and so does <Shift+down> arrow)

Here's a demo video illustrating these review techniques: Click for demo play

Permanently exclude irrelevant search results

If crack tracker finds some irrelevant search results once, chances are that the next time you use it to clear your cracks from filehosting sites, the same downloads will be found and litter your results. You don't want to waste time removing the same wrong results each time. Instead of just pressing <DEL> key to remove unwanted results, right click on them and use the black list command from the context menu. Once you insert a result in the blacklist you will never see it again in a subsequent search.

Partially validated search results

You may notice that a few of the search results have a little red question mark red mark

overlayed to the search engine icon. They just comprise a download URL without name or size information. Not only may these results be irrelevant to your search, they could even point to non-existing downloads (404s).

Crack tracker is fully aware of the biggest file hosting sites like rapidshare and fileserve. But there are hundreds of smaller file hosting sites that are only known by name. Have you heard of glumbouploads.com? I wouldn't have thought so. Results with question marks are hosted in such smaller sites. Here's what you can do about them:

Manual test. Double click on the result link to open the actual download page. If the file doesn't exist, remove the result from the list (or add it to the blacklist).
Ignore them. You won't find many of these question marks in crack tracker. Just file them for removal alongside the rest of the confirmed downloads.

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