November 4, 2008

Google Forum Search

Much like Google Video, Google Groups expanded its index from the Usenet discussion boards and the Google-hosted groups to almost all discussion boards from the web. The results show the same enhanced snippets that were added to the web search last month.


It's interesting to notice that Google's help forums for different services are moving to a new platform initially created for a Yahoo Answers-like Q&A service. Some of the forums have already migrated (Google Talk, Chrome, AdSense) and the benefits are clear: the new forums clearly delimit answers from questions, answered questions from unanswered questions and they encourage people to answer more questions. After migrating its own help forums, Google might make the platform code-named Confucius available to the public.


{ via Blogoscoped Forum }
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9 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 9, 2008 at 8:51 PM

    Nice going....
    I use Omgili for forum search. I expected Google to do much better, their index is small (really!), no advanced search features (date range, minimum number of replies, users etc..), they search on the page title and not on the discussion title (usually a forum has a name added to it) so it damaged relevancy. But I expect Google to solve these problems and offer a great addition to their search services.

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  2. AnonymousNovember 12, 2008 at 7:12 AM

    I see the logic, but I don't like the change. Google groups for me are for Usenet only. That's the whole point.

    If I want to search the web, I can use the normal Google search. Many comments/answers from private people will not be in form of forums, but blogs, mailing lists or normal static personal webpages. All these will be found using the Google web search.

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  3. comment gravity wellNovember 15, 2008 at 3:40 PM

    uhh

    haven't you people heard about the new

    FCC Open Access rules??

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownDecember 2, 2008 at 1:20 AM

    this change is very bad, we want easy way to continue search only usnet!

    let's say: groups only vs groups & forum

    ReplyDelete
  5. Alex ChituDecember 2, 2008 at 2:58 AM

    @mttc:
    So you didn't notice the radio buttons next to the search box?

    Search: [x] all groups [.] Google Groups

    ReplyDelete
  6. MartyJune 17, 2009 at 10:40 AM

    I am agree, this change is bad...

    ReplyDelete
  7. MattwiAugust 11, 2009 at 1:20 AM

    Unusual for google to be behind a trend for a change...although I can't see it being very long before this search becomes as useful as the "ordinary" search engine. Their algorhythms are very advanced nowadays

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  8. AnonymousAugust 12, 2009 at 9:11 AM

    I used http://zhift.com/ as my Forums search but it's down right now(but they says that they will be back in 02.09.09), so i am using Omgili right now, i have tried google and they really sucks at it

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  9. AnonymousOctober 2, 2009 at 10:02 AM

    I've been through all the forum search engines and I think Tweble found the solution! They are tracking discussions in real-time, you could check it out at http://www.tweble.com

    The discussions are also categorized ... finally!

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