By public humiliation, so here comes the humiliation, searchuo. There are three search engines for Ultima Online. I don’t have anything to hide because I honestly believe finduo.com is the best one. The other two are searchuo.com and ultimacodes.com. I was the first one to have images of all items, I wrote some software to extract them out of the UO client back around April 2008 I believe. I came out with about 2500 of the most common images and whenever someone found an item on finduo, I’d show a picture of what it looked like.

I worked really hard on my images. I also knew my competition, and highly suspected that Mark from searchuo would try to take them. So I cleverly encrypted them all, as well as watermarked them for finduo.com. For a good long time, I exclusively had images of Ultima Online items. I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but W@R came out with his uo search engine at ultimacodes.com. W@R is my direct competition, I don’t have anything to gain by promoting him, or standing up for him. But I know he has employees, he invested the time, effort and money, he has a wife and family to feed. He invested all that and got images on his website. Kudos to W@R for temporarily having more images than I have.

As I thought about it, I went dammit … I … better … not … see (*sigh*). You see, W@R didn’t do a single thing to protect his images, he didn’t watermark them and he didn’t try to hide his naming structure at all. I quickly contacted him to try to show him how to encrypt and watermark them, but alas it was too late.

Just as expected, within a week Mark had stolen his images and stuck them on searchuo.com. I guess you could argue that EA owns the images, and W@R and myself took them from EA, and Mark took them from W@R, everyone took them so all is fair right? Not in my opinion, I spent more than a month of 60+ hours a week for two months to figure out how to extract my images. W@R has employees he pays, each with families to feed. Spongemark just copied them. Fortunately, he only could figure out how to steal the graphics that weren’t colored.

So am I clever enough to not get my images stolen by Mark? Not entirely. I spent alot time running around like a chicken with my head cut off, taking snapshots of houses, editing them (this was before I wrote software to extract all the images automatically). I wanted to do more than show the map, I wanted to show the houses on the map. Mark stole all those too. Fortunately, he’s lazy when it comes to improving searchuo. All of the pictures he stole from me that are nearly 6 months old, haven’t been updated yet. You can see them when you’re looking at the maps of where specific vendors are located. Seems to me he would have been better off just using blank maps than showing off homes that haven’t been there for more than 5 months, though far be it from me to encourage Mark to take my newer ones.