Zhift

This has the makings of a very useful idea - a search engine that indexes only forum postings. If you want only to see what other people like yourself are saying about a subject you're interested in, or you want to join a community but don't know how to find one, this is an idea that will appeal to you.

There are other ways to locate forums of course, and if you're a Google user the search that will probably prove most useful to you is using the "allintext" and/or "allinurl" operators. "allintext: star trek forum" (without quotes) will return pages where all three words are in the text of the page. And "allinurl: star trek forum" does the same, but for the address of the page. You can use either or both operators in the same query. A little experimentation with key words will get you quite a lot of useful returns.

But that's regarded as an "advanced" search technique and you probably don't want to have to remember it. And I'm not aware of anything as clever being available for Yahoo or Bing. An independent search engine that does the work for you and uses a more intelligent or more comprehensive formula would be cool.

Sadly, this particular search engine hasn't really got a grip on the problems surrounding forum postings as yet. I picked a search term which, promisingly, returned about a half million hits; but after going through the first six pages of them, around half were either postings no longer there, or were on private forums that I wasn't allowed to read. The first may be an issue with the currency of the database that's being used, or it may be that the engine can't tell the difference, but the second is more thorny, I imagine, and I don't know how they're going to get around that one.

Tantalizingly, there is a link to a pre-alpha test of a PDF search too, and I could see a potential market for that one somewhere down the line. But a pre-alpha generally means it's at the "maybe this might be a good idea, maybe not" stage so we'll have to await developments.

Meanwhile, this may be a project to bookmark and come back to later, or one you might like to play with and see if you strike lucky faster than you would at Google.