Bike Index is very well known at least in OR/WA (I'm in PDX) and has been around a long time. I appreciate you're supportive of another effort but you don't need to push one effort down to lift another up.
I don't see where I said anything disparaging bikeindex, it certainly can't hurt to register a bike or search on both sites. My comment was a one person sample size anecdote of what I've commonly seen used on the west coast.
interestingly both sites want to claim to be the single authoritative source of data, and place to register and search for stolen bikes, but the "market" for such online services is really split between the two... or maybe there's a 3rd online bike registry I'm totally unaware of as well?
in reality I think the data is split between the two sites. My bike is registered on 529, this has provided motivation to me to also submit the same photos/data to bikeindex for a belt and suspenders type approach.
I was surprised by the table showing 177,000 listings for one and 700,000 listings in the other.
Ideally they could both share data and mirror each other for both registrations and stolen bike listings, for the most effective use by people who may be unaware of the other entity.