About

My name is Alex Sulimanov, I’m the author of this project. The idea was born in May 2018, when my bike got stolen from the garage of the building where I live in San Francisco, CA. As for many of you, my bike had a sentimental value to me. Multiple resources available at that time recommended to search online in hopes that the thief would resell the bike or the bike resurfaces online countless other ways. I spent many hours scanning ad websites, Facebook groups, etc. without any success. Back then I thought to myself that I wish there was a tool where I can just search across many websites.

Although there are many ways to prevent theft, thousands of bikes are stolen every year in San Francisco alone. With machine learning and large quantities of public data, we can build a service to quickly search for bikes which look similar and hopefully help identify their location. This project is a first attempt at implementing that type of crowd search online. We don’t offer support in actual retrieval of your property, but rather help find them.

My global aim with this project is to help fellow riders and our communities become safer and more transparent. But I possibly can’t do it all alone. I’d be thrilled if there are other people who would be interested in joining me to continue developing this project. Please feel free to email me at bike.search.info@gmail.com for more information.