Searching the forums

A few weeks back, when I got my E71, I was searching for some cool tools for the phone. I tried searching on Google’s Blog Search. I mostly found reviews of the phone, a few blog posts about popular applications that I already knew of. Not what I was looking for.

In my Windows Mobile days I used to be a regular reader of the forum MoDaCo. There was a lot of information there with a huge group of passionate Windows Mobile users. So I figured there has to be a similar forum for Nokia phones. Google came up with a bunch of forums. I kind of liked Howard Forums. But there were a lot of other too.

I was about to post about the lack of a good search engine for such forums. The built in search kind of always sucks and searches only that forum. But I got lazy and never posted about it. Suddenly last month I saw results like the above in Google. Google probably always indexed forums but now it had more meta data about the search result. 15 posts – Last post: Aug 11. That’s neat. In some results it shows the number of authors posting. Nice to know if some one answered a question…

But this is still in Google’s main search results. I was thinking Google should add a Google Forum Search. Well Google did not do that but they integrated it with their Google Groups Search. This searches online forums along with Usenet and Google Groups. Way to go Google. Keep innovating.