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Comment by albatrosstrophy | Hacker News Reader

Ona tangential note, I remember a time when Google had the option to search only for 'discussions'. The results were amazing and accurate as it scoured online forums. Almost all issue I had (was following the rooting scene closely back then) were quickly resolved. Then suddenly it got removed for reasons unknown to me. Anyone knows if it's replicatable today?

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I have a suspicion they removed it because of the amount of spam on those forums. There's tons of abandoned forums that are only occupied by spambots.

There's even pretty convincing looking accounts and messages that turn out to be spam in the end, once they start trying to post links.

I have Akismet on the comment section of the Wordpress front-end of the site I run, it basically said something like 99.99% of attempted comments were spam. I'm sure the same applies to e-mail and the like.

Everyone is a spammer according to Akismet. I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of that 99.9999% is false positives.

You could start a website for people you don't like, flag all the comments as spam and they wont be allowed to post anything elsewhere - forever!

That percentage sounds about right to me. I've seen comments on blogs from ~10-15 years ago, that continue to have spam posted to them. The first 2-3 comments will be relevant, but comments 50-100 may have a single relevant comment along them, with a total of anywhere from 300-3000 comments. Older comments link mainly to blogs (*.WordPress.com) and such, while newer comments link to Facebook and Instagram.

Reminds of those "fake forums" I sometimes see when exhausting google's results. Found a screenshot of the concept here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/jxtr1k/but_it_requir...

Brave Search recently implemented "discussions". From what I've seen it is mostly Reddit results but StackExchange also can appear there.

https://searchengineland.com/brave-search-discussions-383706

Sometimes adding "reddit" to a search query produces fantastic results.

I do this all the time

I have had some success adding "forum", when looking for trade discussions; eg: controls & automotive. With all the walled silos on the net, this is much less useful with every passing day. On the bright side, I don't have to use -twitter & -facebook, so there's that.

This is great but it seems reddit has done something to mess with their date reporting. When looking for recent posts, I might see a result on Google that says it was posted in the last few days, but on clicking the result will actually be from years ago.

might also be google. I've noticed inaccurate dates that don't appear anywhere for some of my pages. my only theory as to why these were displayed is that google interpreted a (server side) randomly generated number in an inline script as a timestamp (but i can't know for sure that's what happened)

Messed up dates, plus irrelevant topics showing up because there are matched snippets in “more posts from…”.

I use "site:reddit.com" to fully restrict to that. You can even filter by subreddit that way.

Works well with HN and other sites, too.

Not sure for how much longer this is going to work. Plenty of marketers make fake posts there in grassroots campaigns. Reddit itself is an advertising company.

God I hope they never find out about this site.

Brave Search does have a discussion search section.

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