untangling_the_web

DID: 4046925
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posts, Japan is far in the lead with over two million posts per day on their largest
forum, 2ch. The United States does not have anyone large forum, but instead
several hundred thousand smaller forums ...China, the Netherlands, and France are
also home to hundreds of independent forums."!"
There are several major search engines specifically designed to index and search
forums, message boards, and discussion groups. BoardTracker, Lycos Discussions
and BoardReader make it possible for users to search many more online discussion
communities than ever before.
BoardReader, which was offline for most of 2005, is back and improved. The site
has several software partners, including Vivisimo, the clustering metasearch engine
behind Clusty, and Thunderstone to search and group information from Internet
forums and message boards. There is an option to limit searches by date, site, and
language. The sources indexed by BoardReader still tend to be very different from
those accessed by Lycos Discussion, Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups, making it a
valuable addition to "hidden web" search. BoardReader does recognize non-Latin
character sets. The biggest change to BoardReader is the addition of a Domain
Profile option, which uses data BoardReader gathers by indexing forums to create a
detailed picture of a domain, including number and sources of inbound links, the
pages in a domain with the most active inbound links.
BoardReader
http://www.boardreader.com/
BoardTracker searches only for the content of message boards/forums and can be
used as a traditional keyword search engine or a browsable directory of message
boards by topic. BoardTracker has an "instant alerts system" whereby it "will notify
you in a number of ways (email, Jabber, ICO) as soon as a thread matching your
search term is posted on any of the thousands of forums we track." While
BroadTracker does not require registration to use, its alert service obviously must
require registration, which in turn requires a valid email address. Nonetheless,
BoardTracker's registration does not ask for your name or address, so users can
employ a free email service such as Hotmail or Yahoo Mail for BoardTracker alerts.
Notice the search options BoardTracker offers, including the search for Threads or
by Author, to sort by Relevancy or by Date, and to search in All Categories, your
own selected threads, or in a specific category, which often has more subcategories
within it, e.g., World & Regional includes specific continents, General, Middle East,
and Warfare. I am also happy to report that BoardTracker searches equally well
in non-Latin character sets as it does in English. I am also intrigued that it will
search for results from the "past 6142 years."
129 "Internet Forum," Wikipedia, (14 November 2006).
352 UNCLASSIFIEDffl"'Ofit Oprl"'lel1tL tJ!1! ONLY