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Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaul
by jwestbury 3y ago
Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaulted to this when I was looking for, e.g., product reviews -- because it would bypass the endless SEO spam where someone found some highly-rated products on Amazon and published an article "reviewing" them.
Unfortunately, Google killed that search type. There are some browser extensions and bookmarklets that help, mostly by creating a very complicated search query that looks for specific things in the URL, but the discussion search is something I still mourn.
For what it's worth, my technique these days is to find a forum which has a large amount of discussion, then add a site filter to my Google query and only search that site. For something like product reviews, I can usually find the lesser-known products that don't show up on the SEO lists, at which point I now have a good keyword to find other enthusiast discussions online, which begins to open a lot of doors.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite refined the method for anything other than product reviews. At this point, I've started just using ChatGPT for factual questions before trying Google. :(
- the_pwner224 3y agoSimply adding "forum" onto the search query has worked pretty well for me. Of course, when I am aware of a specific forum which exists for that topic, site:... works well too.
- owlninja 3y agoSame, if I am done reading reddit discussions I will just switch to 'forum' and occasionally stumble into some forum threads. Most are dead now though!
- Gloomily3819 3y agoI wonder how much more active would forum websites be today if Google hadn't shut down the discussion search mode.
- denimnerd42 3y agoI used to frequently add vbulletin onto searches about 10 years ago.
- Gloomily3819 3y agoThe Discussions page on google was fantastic. I was able to find information so easily. When they shut it down, there was a firefox extension to bring it back. Until Google shut it down completly. I've always wondered why they did that. Perhaps they wanted to bring attention to bigger websites with adsense? I have no idea.
- mastercheif 3y agoKagi.com has a discussion onebox, it's incredibly useful.