Google Now Highlights Individual Threads from Forums

Though the world has moved to blogs, social networks, questions and answers sites and all manner of other sources, forums can still be a great place for information especially for certain queries. The problem is that actually getting to the information you want in a forum can be a daunting task with multiple threads on the same topic possibly spread out through several sections. But, if there's searching to be done, Google comes to the rescue, as usual, and the search engine now lists several threads from the same forum in the search results.

“Today, we introduced a new search feature that makes it easier for you to find forum posts or discussions related to what you're searching for. This new addition to Google search results applies to sites that tend to have a large number of posts on a specific topic. When several different discussions on a site are relevant to your query, we indent them under the primary result and include the date of each post,” Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google, wrote.

It's easy enough to see the new feature in action – some may have already seen it as Google has been testing it with a limited audience for a while like it does with most new features – you just have to do a relevant search. Now, when a search result is from a forum, below the regular result box Google lists links to several similar threads from the site also showing how many users have posted and how old the thread is.

The feature is somewhat similar to what Google has been doing lately with other search results as the search engine recently introduced other types of links with a similar function. For example, the results for some pages, like Wikipedia, now list several links to the main sections on that page. Other results feature a “Jump to...” link that directs users to the portion of the page that interests them.