ResearchBuzz

Search engine Gigablast ( http://www.gigablast.com ), which seems to have taken the recent Microsoft/Yahoo/Ask news as a big ol’ kick in the pants, has announced Gigablast Site Search.

This service means you can get free site and Web search via Gigablast on your Web site. Gigablast also mentions that those sites which use the site search will (from the announcement) “receive priority during the Gigablast indexing process.” So use the service, get a bump in how often your content gets indexed.

You can go to http://gigablast.com/index.php?page=help#web-search to get instructions on how to add a site search page to your site. When I looked at these instructions, they looked awfully familiar. I may be remembering incorrectly but these look like the instructions Gigablast had some time ago for creating a site search engine.

“If those are the same instructions,” I thought while scanning them, “then there also should be… aha.” After the instructions for the site search engine, there’s instructions for creating a Gigablast search engine that searches several sites. It doesn’t have the level of control that something like a Google Custom Search Engine does, but it’s very quick to knock together and doesn’t require an account. Less clear is whether search engines included in these types of engines will get an indexing bump.

What a coinkydink! I’ve been doing a big physical plant project at work this week, and when I woke up this morning my back went Twing! And then I come home from work and read about a new resource called Twing, at www.Twing.com. That resource is not about backs, however; it’s about finding online discussion groups and posts.

Twing has a directory of discussion forums, and a “buzz” section that shows the most popular links and forums, but I’m going to stick to the search form. That’ll keep me busy enough because it has three tabs - one for posts, one for topics, and one for finding forums. (A preference link lets you set your filter level and specify how many results you want on a page.)

I searched for chiropractor. In the posts box it got me over 9,000 results, with search results showing what appears to be the name of the thread, a snippet, when it was posted, how many replies and how many view it’s had (very useful) and where it was posted. Though you could see when something was posted I didn’t see a way to sort results by date, but you could limit your results by a date range — look at the left side of a search results page for an extensive set of ways to filter your results further.

On the topic forum, the same search got me 99 results, with the results limited to the name of the topic, the posting date, and the replies and the views (no snippets, in other words.) And the search in the Forum tab brought no results at all. Here you would have to be very general. Even baseball found only six results, with the name of the forum and URL.

When you’re looking at search results for any of the tabs, look out for this little INFO icon. If you click on it you’ll get a graph of that forum’s posting activity over time. A very handy thing to have if you’re trying to find a place to monitor for information or to you join. (How much activity can you stand?)

If you’re at a loss for what to search, you can check out popular posts and community searches on the front page. (”Chips Ahoy”? “Hydrogen”?) Twing also has a blog, but so far I see only one post…

SeattlePI.com has mentioned a search engine for message boards called Dipity (Dopity Doo?) It’s at http://www.dipiti.com/ .

Dipiti, according to its home page, indexes over 2300 communities and almost 29 million conversations. They’re divided broadly into health, legal, money, and pet care. (So this is not the search engine to find hockey conversations or discussions of politics.) There’s a tag cloud of topics or you can search within one of the aforementioned categories (or all of them if you like.)

I did a search for psoriasis (long story) and got 11 results. The results were for sites, and they included Topix.com, CureSearch, ButYouDontLookSick.com, and Self. Each listing contained a brief excerpt and a count of related conversations (from 1 to over 50.) A couple of the communities had user ratings while they all had a Dipiti score, which grades the sites based on a number of factors (explanation here.) If you want to pursue the related conversations, it looks like you go straight to the site.

I’ll try this search engine the next time I need to do some health searches, but I wish it offered some kind of RSS feed and that there was an easier way to go straight to relevant conversations.