Stolen-Lost product reviews

Having been the victim of theft and burglary on a number of occasions (until I wised up and built a security system using some nifty Swann security cameras, a couple of motion sensors and a whole swag of magentic window and door sensors all wired through a PC...) I was quite surprised I hadn't heard of this site earlier, even though it has clearly been in operation for a number of years.

Reasonably easy to list an item, with plenty of fields that cover almost every possible bit of important information, serial numbers, make and model details, identifying marks, location it was lost/stolen from, even colour! Very comprehensive and detailed.

Searching for listed items is a little tough though, because of a weak wildcard search. It appears that the search engine will only search a narrow range of data fields, so searching for anything lost in the New Plymouth area, for example, is pointless. You need to be quite specific or you will end up with no results, or wrong results. I tried a few searches, and didn't get a hit on anything specific, only getting results on vague searches that required me to wade through about 18 listings until I found anything remotely close. This area of the site could use a bit of an Extreme Makeover, SEO Edition.

Overall, a pretty good resource, totally under-exposed and under-utilised, yet it could be amazingly effective if tweaked up a bit and used properly. A bunch of little flyers in every police station, to be issued along with the usually-pointless "Victim Support Services" brochures would be an excellent investment. Heck, even getting the site address INCLUDED in those brochures would make the them worth reading, and the site far more effective. SPREAD THE WORD! TELL YOUR MATES! it just might save them some hassle and a handful of cash!