A forum search engine?

[cyberfixation]

Does anyone know of a search engine that only searches through forums OR a way to tweak a search engine to only provide results from forums?

I know of search engines (technorati.com) that only search blogs but I think a forum will have more up to date info then a blog.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks

 

[GTAce]

My suggestion to you would be to find the biggest forums about your question - http://www.big-boards.com and then search them individually...

No, I don't know of any search engine that will do this...personally, I'd just google it...if Google can't find an answer to your question, it doesn't exist!

 

[cyberfixation]

Let me give you some insight to my question:
My end goal is to see how popular a certian subject is, so i figured that if i could search for that subject on a "forum search engine" then i would know how popular it was in the near term (not so long ago that someone created a website or a blog entry about it and it eventually got crawled by a search engine [even though they are fast these days]).
...So therefore it would suck to go to a 30 different forums and see if someone posted something about the subject i am researching in the past 30 days... Does that make more sense?

Ideally i want to be able to compare results from subject 1 with subject 2 to see which is more popular.

 

[GTAce]

Well, I still don't have a forum search engine for you, but I will recommend http://www.big-boards.com/ once again. It is essentially a collection of the largest forums on the internet...So if you're looking to start a new forum and dont want to compete with 10 other "big dogs", then check to see how many are at big-boards.

 

[cyberfixation]

Thanks GTAce! I will definitely check it out. I had no clue what they were.

 

[weblord]

a forum directory for small forum that is:
http://www.gandalfdir.com/

not my site

 

[cyberfixation]

a forum directory for small forum that is:
http://www.gandalfdir.com/

I like it.

Keep them coming!

 

[weblord]

try this one:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=fo...Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8
lots of them there

 

[greggish]

I don't know of any SE's that specifically search just forums, but you could do something like this by just using a regular SE like Google and adding the copyright of popular forum scripts to the search. For instance if you wanted just to get results of Paris Hilton only on forums type this into google...

"Paris Hilton" "Powered by: vBulletin" OR "Powered by phpBB"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...+vBulletin"+OR+"Powered+by+phpBB"&btnG=Search

Add more copyrights of other forum scripts to search more types of forums. I actually wanted to make a search engine that just seacrhed forums a while ago. I may still try to develop one.

 

[cyberfixation]

BRILLIANT! Awesome idea greggish!

So then are vBulletin and phpBB the two big contenders or are there a few others as well?

How regularly do you think Google crawles a forum?

 

[greggish]

BRILLIANT! Awesome idea greggish!

So then are vBulletin and phpBB the two big contenders or are there a few others as well?

How regularly do you think Google crawles a forum?

There's also FuseTalk and infopop... I think they recently changed their name to Groupee... and Community Server... and others.... It actually would be useful to create a quick little site as a frontend to Google or Yahoo that automatically put in the copyrights of major forum scripts to do this. You would however miss those boards that removed the copyright though, but it would still be a good idea I think.

 

[cyberfixation]

Yeah, i agree. its a great idea for sure.

I am not much of a programmer (at all) but i agree with you also on the front end part. That would be a pretty cool tool for sure.

Is it pretty easy/common for a forum to mess with the code that displays the software copyright?

 

[Fleege]

would be great if there was one.

You could also do a allinurl: search and get search results of pages with forum in url. But I bet that's a handful and NamePros for instance wouldnt show up - what shame.

Love the big-board list. just a bad domain name since every time I go there I go to one of the domain variations parked pages. Would love to have one of those. Big big board is great. It has been fun too to see NamePros climb quite high...!!!!

 

[greggish]

I bet the big SE's will add "limit search to forums" at some point. I'm surprised they haven't included this ability yet.

 

[America First]

Yeah, i agree. its a great idea for sure.

I agree!

Love the big-board list. just a bad domain name since every time I go there I go to one of the domain variations parked pages. Would love to have one of those.

I got the best name for ya;
ForumRooms.com :tu:
Its funny I bought it for this reason to build a site that could search and find all forums on it.
I have had it a few years, maybe I could help with this name?

 

[cyberfixation]

Here is a list of strings that most likely mark a page as a forum page (most popular first, then the rest that i could find):

Powered by: vBulletin
Powered by phpBB
Powered By ezboard
phpBB Group
Powered by SMF
UBB.threads

Powered by ZeroForum
Powered by YaBB
Powered by XMB
powered by: snitz
Powered by React
Powered by PunBB
This Board Hosted For FREE By ProBoards
powered by groupee community
Forum MesDiscussions.Net
powered by lithium
Invision Power Board
powered by Ikonboard
powered by the Ideal BB
FuseTalk Standard Edition
Powered by Discuz!
site:forumplanet.com
Powered by CrazyWeb
Forensoftware: Burning Board
AceBoard Forum Gratuit

** this list was generated by taking all the different forum software that big-boards.com recognizes and finding the copyright string or some sort of string that was found on every page...

So theoretically if you put quotes around each of the previous strings and add "OR" between each one you would have a search engine that searches most all of the forums on the interweb. Right?

HOWEVER, doesn't google limit queries to a certian number of characters? So if that is the case this order should be arranged by the string that brings up the most forum pages and then use as many as possible.

Am I on the right track here?

 

[greggish]

Sounds good to me cyberfixation. If you do get a forum search site up and running let everyone know. I know I'll use it.

 

[chimaera]

I remember seeing a site for sale a month or two back, maybe here, maybe on SP, that did exactly this. It was limited to 5 or 6 forums (like NP, SP, WHT, DNF, etc), but displayed the results quite nicely.

Trouble is, I've searched for 10 minutes and can't find either the site name or the thread. I'll let you know if I come up with anything!

 

[khuldun]

maybe you could simply search for the word forums, that might include all sorts of forums out there, because most of the forums have the keyword of forums, so that should be of some help

 

[infamo]

i use this: http://www.google.lt/search?q=inurl...ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official