Searching Lycos for Discussions

Lycos doesn't seem to get on many search radars these days, which is why it was a bit odd to hear from them that they're now offering a discussion search. It's in beta, and can come up with some pretty strange results. See for yourself at: http://discussion.lycos.com . It appears to search online forums and other discussion sources.

Run a search. I tried paragliding. It probably wasn't meant to be, but I found the filtering option on the results page funny; you can filter for offensive content always, sometimes, or never. I'm sure that refers to some level of filtering -- the help page doesn't mention it -- but it sounds kinda arbitrary to me. "Yeah, sure. Sometimes we'll filter your results and sometimes we won't, so just keep that bottle of Tums handy."

You've got four levels of search results available. The first one, Any Sites, was the best one for me. this level of search seemed pretty tightly focused on online forums. The next two levels of sources limited your search to Yahoo Groups and MSN Groups. The search results I got here were nothing I couldn't have gotten with a site: syntax search somewhere else, and I think that would have been better -- a lot of the pages here were missing descriptions and in some cases titles. The last level of searching is called .orgs only, and it didn't do much for me. The results I saw didn't seem to be oriented towards forums at all; they were just org results -- again, something easily done with a site: search.

If I were Lycos, I'd keep the first level of results, ditch the other three, provide some explanation of the filtering process, and maybe work a little on determining forum dates for a date sort. There have to be RSS feeds of forums out there somewhere.

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