Why Shoo says ‘not sure’

The Shoo detector has one rule we will not bend. When it cannot tell what is in your photo, it says “not sure” and asks for another photo. It does not guess. We will never tune it to always give an answer, even though an answer every time would feel more impressive.

The detector is live on this website: you can scan a photo today. The phone app is planned, with no date yet. We have not measured how often the detector is right, so this is a post about how it is designed and why, not about results. Here is the thinking.

A confident wrong answer costs you more than “not sure”

With pests, the name is the plan. A small tan cockroach with two dark stripes behind the head is likely a German cockroach, which breeds indoors and needs bait, a growth regulator and weeks of trap counts. A similar-looking outdoor cockroach that wandered in after a porch light needs a door sweep and not much else. A big dark one in the bath is more often up from the drains. Same fright, three different plans.

Now picture getting it wrong with total confidence. Told it is just a visitor from outside, you relax while a German cockroach problem grows behind the fridge. Told it is German when it is not, you put bait and chemicals into a home with a toddler and a cat for a problem you never had, and you lose sleep over it too. Either way, the wrong answer sounded exactly as sure as the right one would have. That is the part that does the damage.

“Not sure” costs you one more photo. A wrong answer can cost you weeks.

Why we made it a rule

Before building anything, we read real questions people had posted on forums. One kept coming up in different forms: a chatbot said one species, an image search said another, both sounded certain, and the person was left asking strangers to break the tie. That exact question now has its own answer: is this a German cockroach or something else, which also covers why the photo tools disagree.

Phone photos of insects are hard. The stripes on a German cockroach are tiny. Kitchen light at night is poor. A squashed one loses its shape, and a young one looks different from an adult. Any tool, or any person, will sometimes not be able to tell. The honest response is to say so.

So it is written into the rules we hold ourselves to, alongside no invented reviews, no made-up numbers and no claims about accuracy we cannot show. The detector says “not sure” and asks for another photo instead of guessing. Nobody gets to tune that away later to make a demo look better.

What a scan shows you

A bare species name is not enough to act on. You need to know how much to trust it. So when the detector does give an answer, it shows its working:

• The species it thinks it is, from a photo of a cockroach, a young one, an egg case or droppings.
• How sure it is, stated plainly, so you know how much weight to put on the name.
• The lookalikes it ruled out, so you can see it considered the obvious alternatives.
• The features it used, like stripes behind the head, bands across the wings or wing length. You can check those against the bug yourself.
• A plan in three steps: free fixes first, then the known products the plan needs, then when it is time to call a professional.

Showing the features matters more than it sounds. If the result says “two dark stripes behind the head” and you can clearly see bands across the wings instead, you know something is off. An answer you can check is worth more than one you have to take on faith. Our four cockroaches side by side shows the tells it looks at.

What a better photo looks like

When a scan asks for another photo, these are the things that usually help, and they help any tool or person you ask today:

• Shoot from directly above, so the shield behind the head is in view.
• Use daylight or a bright lamp, close and in focus, with a coin next to it for size.
• Note where you found it: indoors or out, which room, and whether there were young ones nearby.

When a photo is not the answer at all

Sometimes the best evidence is not a better picture. It is a week of monitor traps. Young cockroaches on an indoor trap mean breeding indoors, whatever the name turns out to be. Empty traps after a couple of weeks mean you can breathe out. That is why a trap tracker is planned: a weekly photo of a trap, adults and young ones counted, and the trend shown, so the plan rests on what is actually happening in your kitchen. It is not live yet. I saw one cockroach explains how to read the traps today, by hand.

And some things should never hang on a photo ID. Later, the detector may be able to name snakes and other animals. Even then, the advice will be the same every time: keep your distance, keep children and pets away, and call local animal control or a licensed catcher. Shoo will never tell you an animal is harmless from a picture. There’s a snake in my garden covers what to do in the meantime.

Snakes and dangerous animals: do not get close for a better photo. Your safety comes before any ID. Keep back, keep kids and pets inside, and call local animal control.

The same rule on the website

The scanner on this site works by these rules today, and the app will use the same detector. It says when it is not sure. It never invents a species, and it never invents a fix. It recommends only known, established solutions, and never anything that overrides a product label. How Shoo works walks through the steps from photo to plan.

What we will not claim

You will not find an accuracy percentage on this site, because we have not tested the detector on a set of real photos yet and have nothing honest to put there. Any scan result you see in our designs is labelled as an example until it is real. When there is something true to say about how the detector performs, we will say it plainly. Until then, the promise is narrower and easier to keep: when Shoo is not sure, it will tell you.

To see it work, scan a photo: your first 3 scans are free. For the phone app, the app page has the waiting list.