Pierre -- I can imagine that this must be frustrating!
I think that this is just going to happen. It's inevitable. However, I think that perhaps something else is going on. I think that if you can work on improving your search engine placement overall, that the legitimate sites will overpower the pirate sites. I can use an example of Fraser Speir's Viewfinder. Shortly after its release, I did a bit of googling and he had quickly gotten the "badge of honor" of being cracked." Because his app was so new, it hadn't really made it into the mainstream websites. The pirate sites are, unfortunately, fairly well placed by Google, and I"m guessed that there is so much activity that they tend to get scanned daily, if not more frequent. Either this will come naturally -- try the query again in a few days, and see if more legitimate websites (that outrank the pirate sites) show up in the first few pages of Google results. E.g. websites like your own, Twitter, Yahoo groups, MacUpdate, Apple Downloads, Cnet, facebook, squidoo, IUseThis, VersionTracker, MacNN, TUAW, etc. Actually, you should take into account that many of these websites may require some human editorial contribution, and a lot of people are not working much during the Winter (northern hemisphere) holidays like Festivus and Christmas. If you don't start seeing the legitimate websites out-rank the pirate sites in a few days, then this probably means that these websites are not noticing your application, and you need to work a some Search Engine Optimization to get more links into your own website, and also other websites talking about your product. (BTW I didn't find any press releases about HoudahSpot 2.6; the only legitimate posts about 2.6 that I could find were just the software tracker sites and echoes of that.) I have posted a bunch of tips that hopefully will be useful over on the Karelia marketing blog: http://www.karelia.com/marketing/ .... Good luck! Dan Another note: It seems to me that specifying the version number in the search string is more likely to turn up the On Dec 27, 2009, at 3:31 AM, Houdah - ML Pierre Bernard wrote: > Hi! > > I have just released HoudahSpot 2.6. The press release is coming out on > Monday. Out of curiosity, I ran a Google search for "HoudahSpot 2.6" to see > how far the news had already spread. > > The bad news: most first and second page results are links to cracked copies. > http://www.google.com/search?q=houdahspot+2.6 > > I can't tell if the cracked copy actually works. RapidShare won't let me > download without a Premium membership. > > Yet I am quite shocked by how fast and how far this has spread. This happened > within hours of the release. > > I have sent an email to RapidShare asking them to take down the file. But > they don't seem to be in a rush to react. Anyway I don't see this do much > good. The cracker will always be faster at uploading the file than I will be > at getting those sites take it down. > > Pierre > > - - - > Houdah Software s. à r. l. > http://www.houdah.com > > HoudahGeo: One-stop photo geocoding > HoudahSpot: Powerful Spotlight frontend > > > > > > > ------------------------------------ > > MacSB email guidelines: http://tinyurl.com/2g55d6 > Use MacSB-Talk for off topic messages: > http://groups.google.com/group/macsb-talk > Yahoo! Groups Links > > >
