What does hash do in python?

I saw an example of code that where hash function is applied to a tuple. As a result it returns a negative integer. I wonder what does this function do? Google does not help. I found a page that explains how hash is calculated but it does not explain why we need this function.

Fastest way to search a list in python

When you do something like "test" in a where a is a list does python do a sequential search on the list or does it create a hash table representation to optimize the lookup? In the application I need this for I’ll be doing a lot of lookups on the list so would it be best to do something like b = set(a) and then "test" in b? Also note that the list of values I’ll have won’t have duplicate data and I don’t actually care about the order it’s in; I just need to be able to check for the existence of a value.