BoardReader Blog

Ever wondered what are the most active forum sites on the Internet ?
This information is now available on BoardReader.COM in our Boards Rating Looks pretty cool !

We have not been blogging for a while, but that does not mean BoardReader was not being developed, on the contrary during the past couple months we’ve done hundreds of bug fixes and a lot of improvements in search speed and quality, usabilty as well as number of bigger features.

The feature I’m going to talk today is Site profile and Forum Profile.

These tools allow forum owners and visitors to get some fun stats about their particular forum site or given forum in particular. The profiles would show you how many new posts a forum is getting, how active a forum audience is as well as what are the top forums and top threads on the forum.

You can get to these profiles from the search results page by clicking the little image icons with the letter “S” for SITE PROFILE and letter “F” for FORUM PROFILE.

Let us know if you have any ideas how these profiles can be improved.

Ever wondered how people are linking to your web site from Forums ? BoardReader has a perfect tool for that - try searching your domain name or any given URL.

You can also subscribe to RSS and be informed about all new links to your web site from forums indexed by BoardReader.

Watching forum links is especially cool as as these are real links placed by real users, unless you’re into forum spaming of course.

We’ve added initial support for Chinese language to BoardReader. For now now it is pretty basic with each Chinese symbol being treated as separate keyword, but it should already work for many cases. In many cases phrase searches, such as “Text” would work better as this will only search for characters following one another.

In any case we’d welcome everyone to test this feature out and let us know if it needs any improvement.

Ever wondered what people are searching for at BoardReader? Now you can take a look at it via last searches page. These are live searches, a bit filtered regarding adult phrases so you would not get to insulted. We also have list of most actively searched phrases, which is available for today as well as for other days. You can find it a bit boring now as there are a lot of phrases which are only searched once or twice, but it should become more and more interesting as our traffic grows.

Close to the turn of the year we found out there are more than half a billion forum posts indexed by BoardReader.COM and counting within our active live database on BoardReader.com. This is a lot. I remember few years ago Google was below 4 billions of indexed pages and we’re at 10 percent of the size. We will keep you updated as we move toward 1 Billion and beyond in the next couple of months.

Johannes Albert wrote Firefox and IE7 search plugins for BoardReader so now you can add forum search to your quick browser quick access search engines.

Johannes made a great job by implementing both Sherlok based plugin which works with Firefox 1.1 and newer OpenSearch based plugin which works with Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0

To Install plugin on older Firefox blowsers (1.5 and below) you should visit Mozilla Plugin Directory

With Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 simply visit BoardReader.COM and press on the arrow in the right top corner - it will offer to add “Boardreader” search engine to the list.

These features are not yet heavily advertised on the site - as blog readers you have access to fresh stuff first. They will become easier accessible in a few days after some more testing.

So if you find some bugs with them let us know.

Wishing all web users a very happy new year. We hope 2007 will be as productive of a year for BoardReader.com as 2006 was. Please feel free to drop us a line letting us know how we are doing, and don’t forget to let us know what new things might be of interest to you on BoardReader.com.

As you might have noticed some time ago we added an “Images” tab to the search results so now you can look for images on Message Boards. In the future we might extend it to cover other media types. If you have some ideas/requests please let us know.

Here are example search results for Christmas Tree.

Implementing Image search is a challenge. We had to crawl hundreds of thousands of sites to generate thumbnails for millions of images.

Our image search implementation fully respects robots.txt so if you have a private gallery, which is not to be indexed by search engines, images from it would not appear in the search results.

Did you ever want to speed up search function in your forum improve relevance quality or forget all these search overload problems requiring to register to use the search, placing captcha or simple math tests? We’ve now implemented solution which makes it very easy to do it.

Just go to Get Your Form page, select search functionality and style and get the form code. Of course it requires your web site to be indexed by BoardReader in order for it to work, if it is not - Add it.

If you do not like how form is designed you’re free to adjust form design any way it suites you.

One of cool features we’ve implemented in the search form is drop down list of forums which we have indexed for your site, which allows to restrict search to certain forum easily. Here is an example:

If you’re not looking for search form but instead for the page you can bookmark and use as a search for your favorite forum, we have implemented it for you as well: Search forums on given domain

This is also a great link to give if you want to point someone to search of given forum.

Note: You do not have to be forum owner to use this search form. You can place it on any web page or in the forum post to make forum user aware of such functionality.