I finally got around to reading yesterday’s edition of Hacker Newsletter this Morning and an entry caught my eye: this post about “dorking” by Alec Barrett-Wilsdon. The first line of the article starts with a tl;dr: “Use advanced Google Search to find any webpage, emails, info, or secrets.”

To which my inner Yoda says, “Ah, the old ways this one follows!” :)

It seems dorking is basically just the age-old use of querying search engines in order to find something specific. Sound familiar? Our dear pal Fravia+ (may he rest in peace) taught this many years ago on his Searchlores site. I had lamented in this post when his main site finally came down, but many months later had found a working Mirror. Alas, after checking this morning, it seems that mirror is also down, as its domain expired last week. (and in fact is/was hosted by my previous webhost before I moved to KnownHost!)

Alec’s post was a reminder that such knowledge needs to be saved for posterity. This kind of knowledge benefits anyone and everyone who uses the internet. I use it nearly every day for work, as I swear half my job is googling error messages.

Hell, I remember passing on some of these techniques to folks on Neopets when I used to play on there way back when. Good times. :)

Someone had mentioned to me a while back that Fravia+ used to have archives available on his original site that you could download in order to have an offline reference of his works. A bit of digging through the Internet Archive later, and I’d acquired the last one backed up in the digital repository from 2015. I don’t know if that’s the latest, but it does appear to be around the same age as Woodman’s mirror, which is still working, but seems Firefox and Chrome do not like.

I don’t think it’s the most recent copy of the site before Fravia+’s original domain went down, but it’s pretty close from what I can tell. And as long as his knowledge is available to be passed on, it will do! This morning I setup a subdomain with a mirror of the site: https://searchlores.nickifaulk.com/

It’s not much, but it’s the least I can do to keep his teachings available. Thank you, Fravia+. And thank you, Alec, for your post nudging me to action. :)