BoardReader Blog

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.

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.

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.

After number of weeks of hard work and we’re now ready to show results to the public. BoardReader is now back online powered by extremely fast search technology and indexing even more forums than ever.

We also created this blog to inform you about BoardReader happenings - share our development process talk about new cool features and answer some questions which you might have. Even though we’ve done a lot already more features are to come.

Now lets talk about couple of cool features we have working already:

Search

Lets look at BoardReader.COM search results for example for PS3. First thing I should note we’ve designed search results to be very easy to link to from the applications. So if you want to find Keyword you can simply http://boardreader.com/s/Keyword URL to get basic search results. Next you could notice advanced search which offers search functionality if you need something beyond simple keyword search.

We also provided you with quick links to change a way how results are sorted - Relevance or Freshness, Ability to restrict search to only recent posts and to limit your search to some particular language. Language detection is not perfect yet but already quite helpful.

To help you to formulate your query we’ve designed “refine results” bar which helps you to make your search more specific by looking at most frequently used search phrases with this keyword.

At the left side you can see the graph which shows number of documents matched by search query per day for last month. It is very cool to watch for hot terms.

Under the graph you can see forums which match to the search phrase so you can jump to the forum or focus your search on it by clicking play button.

Look at main search results. You can see sometimes they would be tabbed - this way we show result matches are from the same thread, similar as Google would do for sites from same web site.

For each of the posts we also provide information from which site this post comes from and which forum and how many posts are in the thread. So you can jump to such site or forum or focus search on them by pressing play button.

Links

If you own web site you might be interested how people are linking to it from forums. It is easy to do by entering URL or domain name into the search box and Boardreader will automatically detect it is resource and search for links pointing to it. Here is example. Again it is very simple to link to such search results so you can add ability to track links from forums to any page or web site.

Domain Profile

Looking for more aggregate info about how your site is being linked ? Check Domain Profile This page will show you which forum sites are linking to domain and what are most frequent target pages. If domain would have some indexed forums you would also see same information about outgoing links - which domains and pages get the largest number of outgoing links.

YouTube

YouTube is hot so we’ve created YouTube movie rating just for fun. You can see it from front page or see full version. We rank movies by amount of distinct sites linking to the same movie.

Enjoy and we’ll keep you posted.

P.S. If your forums or your favorite forums are not yet indexed we encourage you to add them to make BoardReader even better.