I stumbled across a couple of people blogging about this new search service, written by Matt Burns, that will take an example photo from your stolen camera, then use the serial number embedded in the metadata of that picture to search for other pictures with that same serial number posted to the web. This is not done via a on-the-fly search of the entire internet (which would take a long time) but by looking for the serial number in a smaller database compiled by and for Stolen Camera.
If you aren’t missing your camera, you can help out a bit by running a Chrome browser extension that will record and anonymously submit data on any serial numbers found in photos you look at via Chrome to Stolen Camera Finder.
If you don’t have a sample photo, you do have the ability to manually enter a serial number as well.
Great idea and a good thing to bookmark. I went ahead and installed the Chrome extension just to help out.