BoardReader Searches Internet Forums And Message Boards

By WebProNews
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2004-05-17

With more and more information turning up in message boards, having a search engine that concentrates its search on forums seems like a no-brainer. The stated goal of BoardReader is to "allow our users to search the 'human to human' discussions that exist on the Internet."

BoardReader launched in May 2000 (happy anniversary), from the design of students and engineers from The University of Michigan. From BoardReader's about page: "BoardReader uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense."

The BoardReader technology uses "special retrieval and indexing algorithms as well as unique topic relevance ordering rules" in order crawl one of the most difficult areas of the web to crawl: the hidden web. Most forums and their content reside in this part of the web.

The reason that forums are so hard to crawl is that most of the content is dynamic-based, meaning URLs change and content moves. This makes a search index hard to keep current.

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