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https://crowdview.ai https://crowdview.ai - search engine for forums and discussion sites Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and ha

https://crowdview.ai https://crowdview.ai - search engine for forums and discussion sites Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and have resorted to adding "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to all my queries (since 2015!). Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out "what does a genuine, real life human think about this thing?". But limiting my results to just Reddit isn't ideal because so much great content exists elsewhere. Lots of great information and conversations have moved elsewhere, and niche forums are still alive on the web! But it's impossible to find these places because they rank so poorly on Google. So I built a search engine across a curated list of these, making sure to remove any kind of SEO junk (blog spam, listicles, etc). There's also a chrome extension that surfaces these results alongside Google, so you don't have to remember to keep coming back. Please try it out and share any feedback! (and if you're interested in this topic, join the Slack)

llanowarelves 4y ago
Been wanting this and considered building one. Will try it out. Thanks!
N3cr0ph4g1st 4y ago
This is great. I would love a date filter but even without, it is very useful.
SlackingOff123 4y ago
This is awesome! Thank you! Any chance for a Firefox extension? You mention a Slack workspace. How do I find that? (I don't use Slack outside of work much)
telchior 4y ago
This is neat, I'm going to try using it on some searches tonight. I have two pieces of immediate feedback: - I need a date range option. I'm searching for something about a piece of software and getting answers from around 2011, so far out of date that it's useless. - Really need some padding on the left side of the page ;)
tastysandwich 4y ago
I tried "replacing VS Commodore gasket", expecting to see pages from justcommodores.com.au. Those are the go-to forums for anyone into Holdens (Australian cars that are no longer made). Instead 8 out of the first 10 results were Hacker News? The other two were from from mechanics.stackexchange.com reddit.com/r/CarsAustralia, but neither were about a VS Commodore (instead they were about Nissans). On the other hand, the very first Google result was literally a topic titled "replacing VS heads gasket" on justcommodores.com.au. It's an awesome idea but the results definitely need some work.
qolop 4y ago
I like the general idea behind it but you need to increase the pool of websites you're crawling by a lot. I did not get any results for "Kardashians"
t0bia_s 4y ago
This absolutlly blow my mind. Search results are 100% organic and 1000% more relevant than any search engine gave me. Ever. Even more relevant than payed kagi. I just cannot add CrowdView to search engines in Firefox. Any idea how to fix that?
hexagonwin 4y ago
This is genuinely great. Unlike others spamming my search results with StackOverFlow crawlers I can find actual people's posts here.
8organicbits 4y ago
Wow great work! I quickly got the information I was struggling to find via DDG (and then Google). I've added this search engine by adding "https://crowdview.ai/search?q=%s https://crowdview.ai/search?q=%s" in Firefox's search settings. I'll be trying this again.
joenot443 4y ago
This is awesome! I'll be using it for sure. Where'd you get your curated list of forums? Big search of running VBulletin instances? :)
- kbyatnal 4y ago
  that among others! a lot of manual work + some automated scraping (there's about ~3000 forums in the index today)
  - austincassidy 4y ago
    Love the site. Really great work with it. I had an idea for a similar site, but instead it would essentially be like Pinterest in which you indicate your interests/hobbies and it shows you forums related to those. There's dozens of small forums that I discovered off the 2nd/3rd/4th page of Google results that are super helpful - but hard to find. How did you go about finding the ~3000 forums? That's my main hurdle with the idea.
  - sidmitra 4y ago
    Saw that best espresso machine example on the homepage was missing https://www.home-barista.com/ https://www.home-barista.com/ That's basically Mecca for us coffee geeks :-) so consider adding it.
jmacd 4y ago
This is really nice. I am always appending forums names and reddit to my searches.
- walthamstow 4y ago
  For DIY stuff recently I found just putting 'forum' in the search works well
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    A bit tangential, but I found a bunch of links in my crawl database a while back that had titles like > best electric razor 2022 reddit Pretty creative. Never seen a search engine actually return results like that, but like it's worth a try I guess?
thinking4real 4y ago
Wow, this almost feels like the old internet and old google. Generic results from a few corporate entities has become ubiquitous, but here you can type whatever and it seems to give a broad range of results. Wow, this actually feels like a search engine. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this. How do you rank the results?
- kbyatnal 4y ago
  thank you! results ranking is very primitive today, but a lot of users have commented that they would prefer ordering by date (latest first) so I've been looking into that
vram22 4y ago
What is blog spam in this context? Content farms?
- jsmith99 4y ago
  Blogs that give the impression of honest reviews but are actually low quality content scraped from the product description. The purpose is to make money on the affiliate links when you buy their recommendations.
  - vram22 4y ago
    Got it, thanks.
achairapart 4y ago
It's very cool but then I searched for some random thing and found on the first page my very own comment about it, something I wrote some years ago. Well, that was a strange experience, the whole internet felt unexpectedly so small... Anyway, I'm sure I'll use this again.

llanowarelves 4y ago

Been wanting this and considered building one. Will try it out. Thanks!

N3cr0ph4g1st 4y ago

This is great. I would love a date filter but even without, it is very useful.

SlackingOff123 4y ago

This is awesome! Thank you! Any chance for a Firefox extension? You mention a Slack workspace. How do I find that? (I don't use Slack outside of work much)

telchior 4y ago

This is neat, I'm going to try using it on some searches tonight. I have two pieces of immediate feedback: - I need a date range option. I'm searching for something about a piece of software and getting answers from around 2011, so far out of date that it's useless. - Really need some padding on the left side of the page ;)

tastysandwich 4y ago

I tried "replacing VS Commodore gasket", expecting to see pages from justcommodores.com.au. Those are the go-to forums for anyone into Holdens (Australian cars that are no longer made). Instead 8 out of the first 10 results were Hacker News? The other two were from from mechanics.stackexchange.com reddit.com/r/CarsAustralia, but neither were about a VS Commodore (instead they were about Nissans). On the other hand, the very first Google result was literally a topic titled "replacing VS heads gasket" on justcommodores.com.au. It's an awesome idea but the results definitely need some work.

qolop 4y ago

I like the general idea behind it but you need to increase the pool of websites you're crawling by a lot. I did not get any results for "Kardashians"

t0bia_s 4y ago

This absolutlly blow my mind. Search results are 100% organic and 1000% more relevant than any search engine gave me. Ever. Even more relevant than payed kagi. I just cannot add CrowdView to search engines in Firefox. Any idea how to fix that?

hexagonwin 4y ago

This is genuinely great. Unlike others spamming my search results with StackOverFlow crawlers I can find actual people's posts here.

8organicbits 4y ago

Wow great work! I quickly got the information I was struggling to find via DDG (and then Google). I've added this search engine by adding "https://crowdview.ai/search?q=%s https://crowdview.ai/search?q=%s" in Firefox's search settings. I'll be trying this again.

joenot443 4y ago

This is awesome! I'll be using it for sure. Where'd you get your curated list of forums? Big search of running VBulletin instances? :)

kbyatnal 4y ago
that among others! a lot of manual work + some automated scraping (there's about ~3000 forums in the index today)
- austincassidy 4y ago
  Love the site. Really great work with it. I had an idea for a similar site, but instead it would essentially be like Pinterest in which you indicate your interests/hobbies and it shows you forums related to those. There's dozens of small forums that I discovered off the 2nd/3rd/4th page of Google results that are super helpful - but hard to find. How did you go about finding the ~3000 forums? That's my main hurdle with the idea.
- sidmitra 4y ago
  Saw that best espresso machine example on the homepage was missing https://www.home-barista.com/ https://www.home-barista.com/ That's basically Mecca for us coffee geeks :-) so consider adding it.

jmacd 4y ago

This is really nice. I am always appending forums names and reddit to my searches.

walthamstow 4y ago
For DIY stuff recently I found just putting 'forum' in the search works well
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  A bit tangential, but I found a bunch of links in my crawl database a while back that had titles like > best electric razor 2022 reddit Pretty creative. Never seen a search engine actually return results like that, but like it's worth a try I guess?

thinking4real 4y ago

Wow, this almost feels like the old internet and old google. Generic results from a few corporate entities has become ubiquitous, but here you can type whatever and it seems to give a broad range of results. Wow, this actually feels like a search engine. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this. How do you rank the results?

kbyatnal 4y ago
thank you! results ranking is very primitive today, but a lot of users have commented that they would prefer ordering by date (latest first) so I've been looking into that

vram22 4y ago

What is blog spam in this context? Content farms?

jsmith99 4y ago
Blogs that give the impression of honest reviews but are actually low quality content scraped from the product description. The purpose is to make money on the affiliate links when you buy their recommendations.
- vram22 4y ago
  Got it, thanks.

achairapart 4y ago

It's very cool but then I searched for some random thing and found on the first page my very own comment about it, something I wrote some years ago. Well, that was a strange experience, the whole internet felt unexpectedly so small... Anyway, I'm sure I'll use this again.