Online Forum Sites And Message Board

Some of the best information on the web can be found on message boards. Try these forum search engines for searching them today.

Some of the best information on the web can be found hidden away deep inside forums and message boards. If you have a niche question or problem, forums might be your best chance of finding a solution.

Clearly, it's not practical to search every forum individually; you need a dedicated forum search engine that can scan thousands of communities simultaneously.

So, if you want to know how to search forums and search message boards, keep reading. We're going to look at the best message board search engines available today.

1. Google Forum Search

You may remember that until a few years ago, Google used to offer a Discussions button when performing a search. It filtered your results so they only displayed hits from forums, message boards, and blog comments.

Sadly, the button went the same way as Google Plus and Google Inbox---but that doesn't mean you can't still use the functionality. You just need to use a third-party Chrome extension called Discussions Button for Google Search.

The extension restores the Discussions button alongside the Images, News, and Videos tabs at the top of the results page.

The extension doesn't work in the same way as the old native feature used to. Instead, it modifies your queries and adds a bunch of filters behind the scenes. They allow the tool to as closely mimic the old functionality as possible.

Discussions Button for Google Search is only available on Chrome.

2. Find a Forum

Of course, in addition to trying to find relevant results in forums and message boards, you might also want to find a new forum that focuses on whatever topics you're interested in. Like the best Android forums, for example. You can then join the community and engage with other like-minded individuals.

There are lots of forum searchers out there, but we just like Find a Forum. At the time of writing, it includes more than 1,350 different forums and message boards for you to dig into.

All the forums are neatly categorised into categories.

The top 10 categories with the highest number of forums are Recreation and Hobbies (295), Games and Entertainment (141), Computers and Internet (124), Sports (114), Business and Economy (91), Health (80), Travel and Tourism (77), Family and Home (70), Music (58), and Society and Culture (47).

Find a Forum also has loads of stats about how active a forum is. For each listing, you can see the number of members, the number of topics, the number of posts, the maximum number of concurrent members online, and the last known number of concurrent members online.

You can also see what forum software the site uses, whether the forum has an RSS feed and if the website uses Google AdSense and/or sponsorship.

3. Search Forums Directly

Lastly, keep in mind that almost all forums and message boards offer their own native search engines.

Sometimes you'll be able to use the search tools as a guest; other times you might need to register before you can dig into the content.

4. Other Ways to Search the Web

We know the solutions we've presented aren't ideal. Sadly, the forum search engine choices aren't as extensive as they once were. Perhaps that's a symptom of the way the web is developing. The availability of groups on networks like Facebook and Reddit means there's an ever-decreasing demand for traditional forums and message boards. Don't let that stop you setting up your own forum, though.

So, if these five approaches haven't yielded the results you want, why not read some of our other articles about searching the web? We recommend starting with the best Google Chrome alternatives and learning how to create custom searches in Google Chrome.

DISCUSSION FORUMS

Online discussion forums, also known as World Wide Web forums, bulletin boards, or message boards, emerged in the mid-1990s and allowed Internet surfers to post and respond to messages on the Web. Since that time, discussion forums have become increasingly popular. They cover a wide variety of topics ranging from sports, health, and business, to current events, finance, and entertainment.

The idea for Web-based discussion forums stemmed from newsgroups that used the Usenet system. Developed in 1979, Usenet operated as a bulletin board system and was supported by UNIX machines. As technology advanced, discussion forums were developed to operate on the Web, rather than on a UNIX-based system. Along with newsgroups, discussion forums also were similar to Internet chat. Both discussion forum and chat technologies allowed Web surfers to communicate online.

Discussion forums used asynchronous communication, however, which differed from chat in that it allowed its users to post and respond to messages from any computer at any time, rather than requiring all chatters to be logged on simultaneously.