On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Isaac Dupree < ml@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 10/18/2011 03:59 PM, Heiko Baums wrote: > >> And does Google really need to know everything? >> > > The forum content is public - Google already knows that. > > Your search isn't - I am using DuckDuckGo now for that reason - they have > an excellent non-tracking policy. I used to use "Scroogle" but DuckDuckGo's > results seem at least as good as Google's to me now. > > And what is the forums' >> search function for? >> > > Speculation: If it was phpBB, I'd definitely say "because Google hadn't > become ubiquitous by then" (Google only started in 1997!). In fact it's > FluxBB, which started in 2008 as a fork of PunBB, which might be as old as > 2002 or 2003 judging by the footers of these PunBB-related forums: > http://www.punres.org/ http://punbb.informer.com/**forums/<http://punbb.informer.com/forums/>. > > ~isaac > Google can't restrict its search to specific fora, or to only search text in the topic title or message body. Nor can it sort by post time, which makes it easy to find recent posts. You might be able to get some or even all of those features with fancy stuff like intitle: and such, but that doesn't seem optimal to me.
