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Texas Data Analytics announces ForumDig.com, an intelligent message board search engine built by co-founder Jason Davis. As a car enthusiast and mazda miata owner, I spend lots of time on automotive message boards (primarily miata.net). I've found these boards to be an invaluable source of information - many users of the boards are real enthusiasts, spending hours per week working on their cars. So whenever I have a specific problem or question about my car, online message boards are the first place I look. While these boards have lots of great information, finding it is another challenge. Vbulletin powered sites such as miata.net do have search engines on their site, but they're mainly targeted at finding recent documents, with less emphasis on finding relevant documents. Of course, there's always Google - you can restrict your search to a particular website (e.g. site:miata.net miata engine life). Results are slightly better here. However, Google is a general purpose search engine - they treat message board threads like any other web page.
In fact, message boards are highly structured - each message thread is a series of posts. Each post is written by a particular author. Authors have different interests and are experts in some areas but not others. This is the motivation behind ForumDig, a message board search engine designed specifically to understand the structure of online discussion threads. ForumDig currently indexes only automotive sites, but we're looking to expand into other domains. Try it for yourself (and compare with Google and Yahoo) - below are a few samples to get your started: |
