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January 05, 2006

Omgili Search Engine for Discussion Forums

Omgili, I am given to understand, is actually an acronym for "Oh My God I Love It". Unfortunately Omgili sounds to me like an underachieving dwarf who was cut from the final draft of The Hobbit. (Though I came up with "Kebberfegg", so I can't exactly talk.) Omgili, which is in beta, searches discussion forums, and you can try it at http://omgili.com/.

Discussion forums as defined by Omgili are Web-based discussion groups. There are some search engines for those (BoardTracker springs to mind) but there's plenty of room for more. Omgili offers a basic keyword search with special syntax and a slightly unusual way to do an advanced search from the front page. Enter your query and then doubleclick on a word in the query. An i will pop up over the query box. Mouseover the i and you'll have the option to limit your query word search to title, topic, or reply, or exclude it altogether.

Search results are interesting. I did a search for "Terry Bradshaw" and got 29 results. Results include the title of the post, a snippet, and a direct URL. There's also noted how many replies there are to the topic. (It's noted like this: "Page with topic and at least x replies.") Clicking on the title of a search result, briefly takes you to a page where you can rerun the search on Google Groups or Yahoo Groups, but almost instantly refreshes to the discussion forum you clicked on in the first place. (Am I missing something?)

Once when I looked at a search result I got a 404 error, but only once. I was still surprised at the limited number of search results, but it does say on Omgili's FAQ that the forums to be indexed are hand-picked, and therefore results are going to be limited for the moment. Of course I'd like to see more indexing done, and that double-click thing takes a bit of getting used to, but this is worth a look. How about results in RSS and the option to list results by date?

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